This essay explores the unique insights into the lives and book ownership of the Paston family offered by its fifteenth-century correspondence. It looks at three Paston women ߝ Agnes Berry Paston, her daughter-in-law Margaret Mautby Paston, and Margaretߣs daughter Elizabeth Paston (Yelverton) ߝ and the books that were in their possession or that they may have read. Putting the evidence concerning book ownership provided by wills, for example, alongside that of letters provides intriguing insights into the spirituality and influence of women, and the value they placed on devotional and moral works. The Paston womenߣs reading also included secular romance, the interest of which may have been as much political as personal. The reading interests of such women, then, extended far beyond the narrowly domestic.

The introduction explores womenߣs authorship and addresses the range of works by or attributed to women that were in circulation in England in the Middle Ages in the context of their contributions to a multilingual and inclusive literary culture. It examines the importance of collaboration, arguing that womenߣs writings may be collaborative in different ways: through amanuenses, through translation and adaptation, and through their historical and literary relationships with the men who write their lives. It explores other collaborative aspects of womenߣs literary culture, including womenߣs contributions as patrons, scribes, readers, and subjects of texts. It considers the importance of womenߣs religious communities, as well as the ways in which devotional books were owned by women and exchanged between nuns and by lay women, and it considers the active engagement of women with secular writing as owners and commissioners of books as well as writers. It argues that English womenߣs networks extend from Britain to the Continent and beyond.

The idea of Christ the Physician was widespread in the Middle Ages because cure of the soul was seen as an essential aspect of medical care. Yet for women in particular, the Virgin Mary seems to have had associations with medicine that went beyond her more generally recognised associations with intercessory healing and with childbirth. One of the defining and distinctive qualities of women's visions in the post-Conquest period is the increasing importance of the role played by the Virgin Mary, and some of these visions illustrate vividly Mary's medical role. At the same time, the Virgin Mary was central to the everyday religious life of women in the late medieval household, and prayers to Mary and other forms of Marian devotion were connected not only to motherhood but also to healthcare more broadly. This essay explores the interaction of spiritual and physical health in writing by and about late medieval English women. It argues that the belief in Mary as Physician, in Mary as a doctor of medicine, in late medieval England was closely linked to, and indeed validated, the role of the woman as healer.

The importance of Christ the Physician is examined in Naoë Kukita Yoshikawa's study of the connections between health of the soul and health of the body in the writings of the two late medieval European women visionaries, Marie d’Oignies and Margery Kempe. As Yoshikawa explains:

Yoshikawa's primary focus is on the importance to late medieval female visionary experience of the belief in the ‘medicinal qualities of the Eucharist’. Nevertheless, at the same time, Yoshikawa also addresses the centrality to women's mystical writings of visions of and meditations on the Purification of the Virgin.

Women’s literary historiography

Literary histories of English women’s writing have, traditionally, had little time for the early medieval period. Early medieval women are excluded from teleologies that celebrate the emergence of authorship and literature, understood in specific and restrictive terms, and that only acknowledge certain narrowly defined forms of textual production. They are omitted from linear temporal paradigms that already struggle to accommodate the vernacular visionary writings of the later medieval period and the devout poetry of the Renaissance, but which incorporate far more easily the dramatic texts of the seventeenth century and the prose writings of the eighteenth and nineteenth. One example of such an exclusive literary history is The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women: The Traditions in English, edited by Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, now in its third edition (2007).

These three quotations raise interconnected issues that this chapter will address in regard to the queer representations of old age and desire in the Old English Life of St Mary of Egypt, to recognition, relationality, (un)intelligibility and what Butler calls ‘the limits of sexual autonomy’ and to the troubled kinship of feminism with queer studies and its implications for collaborative scholarship. We begin, in our first quotation, with an old woman – or man – in the desert. This leads us to reflect – as our next two quotations suggest – on much larger questions about age, life cycle, time, temporal crossings, and periodisation in relation to both this text and to our own scholarly positions and practices.

The Old English Life of St Mary of Egypt, the earliest of the many medieval vernacular versions of the life of this particular saint, is found in a late-tenth-century collection of saints’ lives, The Lives of Saints, the majority of which are otherwise by Ælfric of Eynsham.

“And for that fewe men endite . . . ”

In the early to mid 1470s, George Ashby's Active Policy of a Prince ranked the poet John Gower, his more famous contemporary Geoffrey Chaucer, and Chaucer's successor John Lydgate as the “Primier poetes of this nacion.” Ashby celebrated them as vernacular writers, responsible for rhetorical, linguistic, and formal innovations, which he associated with the formation of an English identity and saw as the starting point of a distinctive English literary tradition. Ashby's views were not unique, and, although gradually tastes changed to Gower's disadvantage, Gower, Chaucer, and Lydgate continued to be viewed as a triumvirate well into the sixteenth century. But how accurate is Ashby's appraisal of Gower's achievement, and is he justified in linking his name not just to Chaucer, but to Lydgate, and thus implicitly to other of Chaucer's disciples such as Thomas Hoccleve?

Relatively little is known about Gower's life. We are not certain when he was born (his birth date is taken to be 1330), or where he was brought up. We do not know anything definite about his education, or even about his choice of career, but the consensus, based largely on the evidence of “insider” knowledge displayed in his poetry and of surviving records of various property dealings, is that he trained as a lawyer. We do know that in the 1370s he moved to the Priory of St. Mary Overeys in Southwark, that in 1378 Chaucer granted him power of attorney when he traveled to Italy, that in 1398 Gower married, and that shortly after he went blind, and that in 1408 he died. It is also clear that toward the end of his life, Gower benefited from the patronage of Henry of Derby both before and after he became king. Gower's surviving poetry seems to have been written in the second half of his life, up to around 1400.