This study of medieval nuns and abbesses as scribes focuses on manuscript evidence from post-Conquest England, especially in relation to changing institutional ownership. Looking initially at an early-twelfth-century legal manuscript from St Paulߣs London (Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 383), the essay draws our attention to short texts that were subsequently added to it by one ߢMatildaߣ for the benefit of a female audience. Similar additions are made to another manuscript (London, British Library, Cotton MS Vespasian D. xiv) which contains homilies and saintsߣ lives, this time by an ߢancillaߣ or nun, who inserted prayers that she had authored herself sometime in the late twelfth century. These findings are important because there is very little proof of womenߣs scribal activity in medieval England: hitherto scholars have assumed that manuscripts are written and glossed by men.

This essay examines texts written by, for, and about women from the tenth to the fourteenth centuries, principally in Old English, Welsh and Latin. The aim is to consider how women's voices are represented in literary and legal texts – well-known poems and lesser-known saints’ lives, borough records and accounts of canon law cases – to show that we can better appreciate and better engage with apparent silences or slight murmurs. Women are recorded as present, but saying nothing; or are profoundly active in their own stories, but only indirectly focused upon by the authors. Such silences include those that precede and follow moments of female articulation, and those that are introduced by medieval writers and by contemporary medievalists. It should be remembered that silences do not equate to silence itself; quietening or erasure of women's voices, opinions, and utterances happens through their omission and their being rendered inaudible by writers and keepers of record. The women were not, and are not, silent.

WOMEN'S VOICES: TIME AND KNOWING

Many qualities can be attributed to women's voices when they are recovered, as Diane Watt's magnificent new book amply demonstrates. In that study, Watt highlights the scholarship and artistic genius of pre-Conquest women in England and in continental Europe, often those whose names are already known to modern academics, but whose probable oeuvres and intellectual contributions have been elided or obfuscated by medieval writers, like Bede or Goscelin, and particularly by cultural historians in the last two centuries. Scrupulous excavation of shreds of evidence, together with pellucid speculation, result in Watt's convincing and sophisticated rehabilitation of a host of women authors, poets and thinkers from c. 650 to 1100.

Watt's work provides the impetus, the inspiration and the methodological model for the revitalisation of medieval women's history. But, additionally, Watt explicitly expresses her debt to women medievalists of the last half century, who themselves have sought to redress the imbalance in the scholarly and public understanding of women's significant societal and cultural roles and contributions in the pre-modern period. As Watt builds on her academic foremothers, so too do I, and I want to begin by first making some broader observations about women and stories: about women and collective memory. In the western medieval period, women are often associated with oral culture and the gathering of memory.

THE VISIBILITY OF the intentions and identities of the leading artists, sculptors, scribes, and illuminators of early medieval England seems to become more apparent as the centuries progress, but such acts of representation always require thoughtful work on the audiences’ part. One of those acts of representation concerns the teams of producers, whose work may be deliberately rendered invisible within the object. In early medieval English art, for example, clear signs of the hands of the artists – their personal style, how this thing was carved, painted, and made – are often concealed, yet indications of the maker may be discoverable if one searches carefully for them. These are not meant to stand out, or even to be identifiable, except in a minority of cases, where a lead artist or scribe has significant prestige. In this study we seek to uncover the evidence for the ways in which the producers of textual and artistic objects in the early medieval period made manifest their individual efforts, to determine what presence the maker does have within their own work, and the different ways in which individual craftspeople are identified within objects, especially when the artefact was produced by a team.

Artworks, including illuminated manuscripts, were made for God, or at least manufactured in the sight of God, and expressions of personal artistry might usually have been considered evidence of pride or vanity. Very few artists’ identities are known prior to the twelfth century, and where self-reference appears to be made through the possible depiction of an artist by that artist, their name is concealed and thus lost to history. On the other hand, a portrait of the scribe (and possibly artist) Eadwig Basan survives on folio 133r of the Eadwig Psalter (London, British Library, Arundel 155, c. 1012–23), but scholars cannot be sure that it is actually by his hand. In the twelfth century, by contrast, it is possible to identify some professional artists, including the well-known ‘Master Hugo’, whose work is seen in the famous highly-illuminated manuscript, Cambridge Corpus Christi College, 2 – the Bury Bible, made at Bury St Edmunds.

How the long-standing genre of historical manuscripts show how writers worked with a broad and important sense of their place within a tradition.

This is a brief overview of the skills required to read medieval manuscripts, and synopses of the chapters

This essay seeks to open up an area of study upon which few Arthurians seem to focus: John Steinbeck's debt to, and appreciation of, the medieval. As his corpus of novels attests, he was an author who was familiar with Malory's Morte Darthur. Quite how significant this earlier literary culture was to him has yet to be thoroughly revealed from his thousands of letters, his memoir and his extant manuscript materials. This study will examine one item of evidence from Stanford University Library's Special Collections, which has an extensive Steinbeck collection. The Wells Fargo Steinbeck Collection includes a large deposit of letters, books and photographs that formerly belonged to Steinbeck's sister, Esther Steinbeck Rodgers. Among this rich set of materials is John Steinbeck's own edition of the three-volume The Works of Sir Thomas Malory, edited by Eugène Vinaver in 1947 (Figures 7.1 and 7.2). Stanford only has volumes 1 and 2, and it is rumoured that Vinaver may have given these particular volumes to Steinbeck himself when the two authors met in the years just preceding Steinbeck's stay in England in 1959. In that year, Steinbeck spent a six-month period with his wife, Elaine, at Discove Cottage in Bruton, Somerset, England, so that he could begin creating his modern adaptation of Malory's Le Morte Darthur. It seems he began that task by paying careful attention to Vinaver's edition of Malory.

Within Stanford's edition of Malory, numerous pages contain Steinbeck's own annotations to the Middle English, as he worked on the very early stages of his Arthurian project to transliterate and understand the nuances of Malory's text. This short essay offers a preliminary discussion of some of these annotations to indicate their potential for illuminating the value Steinbeck placed on reading medieval literature in its original form in the mode of a critical glossator, and his overarching desire to make that literature more widely available to modern American readers. It will highlight Steinbeck's glossing and editorial practice to illustrate some of the key features of this work, such as modernization and syntactic reduction. The discussion will thus provide a brief overview of Steinbeck's methods to show how he adapted Malory in his posthumously published, and incomplete, adaptation, The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights.