Cate Gunn & Liz Herbert McAvoy 
Women and Devotional Literature in the Middle Ages 
Giving Voice to Silence. Essays in Honour of Catherine Innes-Parker

Essays on women and devotional literature in the Middle Ages in commemoration and celebration of the respected feminist scholar Catherine Innes-Parker.


Silence was a much-lauded concept in the Middle Ages, particularly in the context of religious literature directed at women. Based on the Pauline prescription that women should neither preach nor teach, and should at all times keep speech to a minimum, the concept of silence lay at the forefront of many devotional texts, particularly those associated with various forms of women’s religious enclosure. Following the example of the Virgin Mary, religious women were exhorted to speak seldom, and then only seriously and devoutly. However, as this volume shows, such gendered exhortations to silence were often more rhetorical than literal. The contributions range widely: they consider the English ‘Wooing Group’ texts and female-authored visionary writings from the Saxon nunnery of Helfta in the thirteenth century; works by Richard Rolle and the Dutch mystic Jan van Ruusbroec in the fourteenth century; Anglo-French treatises, and books housed in the library of the English noblewoman Cecily Neville in the fifteenth century; and the resonant poetics of women from non-Christian cultures. But all demonstrate the ways in which silence, rather than being a mere absence of speech, frequently comprised a form of gendered articulation and proto-feminist point of resistance. They thus provide an apt commemoration and celebration of the deeply innovative work of Catherine Innes-Parker (1956-2019), the respected feminist scholar and a pioneer of this important field of study.

Table of Content

Preface: Tributes to Catherine Innes-Parker by Shannon Murray and Anne Savage


Introduction: Speaking of Past and Present: Giving Voice to Silence – CATE GUNN, LIZ HERBERT MCAVOY and NAOË KUKITA YOSHIKAWA


PART I: THE WOOING GROUP: SILENCE AND ARTICULATION

Voicing the Creed in
On Lofsong of ure Louerde – ANNIE SUTHERLAND

Breath Courting Silence in
The Wohunge of Ure Lauerd – DENIS RENEVEY

Of Loves Both Spoken and Silent: Rābiʿa al-ʿAdawiyya and the
Wooing Group – AYOUSH LAZIKANI


PART II:
DEVOTIONAL TEXTS AND THEIR INTERTEXTS

Sourcing a Critical Edition of
A Talkyng of the Loue of God – MARGARET HEALY-VARLEY

Speaking beyond the Anchorhold in Richard Rolle’s
Form of Living – JENNIFER N. BROWN

‘Speech is silver, silence gold’: Enclosure and Silence in Late Medieval Texts for Religious Women – ANNE MOURON

Arboreal Articulation: The Testimony of Trees in the Late-Medieval Religious Imaginary – LIZ HERBERT MCAVOY


PART III: HEARING AND SPEAKING: UNCOVERING THE FEMALE READER

Vernacular Textuality in Thirteenth-Century England: The
Ancrene Wisse Group Recontextualized – NICHOLAS WATSON

Not So Silent After All: Women Intellectuals and Readers in Medieval Oxford – KATHRYN KERBY-FULTON

A Ladder for Sisters – MICHAEL SARGENT


PART IV: MANUSCRIPTS SPEAKING ACROSS BORDERS

Silence, Sources and Medieval Women: From Alien Bride to Spiritual Director – JOCELYN WOGAN-BROWNE

Anchoritic Interplay between Jan van Ruusbroec’s
The Spiritual Espousals and its Contributions to
The Chastising of God’s Children – MICHELLE M. SAUER

Cecily Neville’s Devotional Library: Networks of Readers and Models of Female Piety – NAOË KUKITA YOSHIKAWA


Envoi: ‘Þis seli stilðe’: Silence and Stillness in the Anchorhold: Lessons for the Modern World? – CATE GUNN


Bibliography of the Writings of Catherine Innes-Parker

Index

Tabula in Memoriam

About the author

NICHOLAS WATSON teaches English at Harvard University. His research focuses on medieval English and North European literature, intellectual history, visionary writing and the role of the written vernacular.