Women, Writing and Religion in England and Beyond, 650–1100

From The New York Review of Books:

At some point between 776 and 786, an English nun in the Bavarian monastery of Heidenheim wrote four lines in a secret code in the space between the end of one Latin text and the beginning of another. She was the author of both—accounts of the lives of Saints Wynnebald and Willibald—but had left them anonymous, describing herself at the start of one as no more than an “indigna Saxonica” (“unworthy Saxon woman”). The code was deciphered only in 1931, by the scholar Bernard Bischoff. Decoded and translated from the Latin, the line reads, “I, a saxon nun named Hugeburc, composed this.” In A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf observed that “Anon…was often a woman.” Sometimes Anon was hiding in plain sight.

Hugeburc’s authorship might strike you as surprising. Reading certain literary histories, you could be forgiven for thinking that ladies didn’t do any authoring until more recent times. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s 1985 edition of The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women: The Traditions in English dismissed the medieval and early modern period as “the Dark Ages” of “the female imagination.” But as Diane Watt, a professor of medieval literature at the University of Surrey, makes clear in Women, Writing and Religion in England and Beyond, 650–1100, the history of English women’s literature is older than popularly thought. It is as old as the history of “overwriting”—a kind of medieval textual mansplaining, whereby women’s contributions were erased or refashioned by male authors.

read more here @ The New York Review of Books