A LITTLE ABOUT ME
Writing
I research and write on topics ranging from medieval history and literature to time management and productivity. Read a selection here. (You might also see my creative writing pop up!)
Guest Blog
As a specialist in the study of women’s education and literacy in England in the Middle Ages, I’m asked this question a lot. I’ll cut to the chase: YES.
Journal Article
This essay provides a holistic review of what girls and young women learned, and the settings in which they learned, in the Middle Ages in England between the Norman Conquest (1066) and the Dissolution of the Monasteries (late 1530s). Education of girls was carried out in households, elementary schools, and nunneries, as well as through employment and apprenticeship. Girls were taught a wide range of subjects, depending on their socioeconomic status, including practical skills, reading comprehension, and social accomplishments. This essay also provides a review to date of the scholarship on the topic.
Read the response blog, "Looking for Women’s Learning in Medieval England," by Zachary Diebel.
Book Chapter
The Ancrene Wisse, or Ancrene Riwle as it is alternatively known, was written in the West Midlands of England in the early thirteenth century as a handbook for such solitary women who sought physical enclosure, away from the world, in order to pursue a higher spiritual calling. Particularly in the past thirty years, though studies of the readership of the AW have grown, few have probed more than superficially the relationship between the text and its thirteenth-century women readers. In this essay, I examine the earliest text and manuscript to argue for more advanced Latinity among its readers than has been suggested heretofore by scholars.
Journal Article
Histories of medieval education focus heavily on the world of the university (mostly male) or of the monastery, yet education was carried out much more broadly, especially for women and children. This article examines evidence of the reading practices, Latinity, and scribal work in the earliest text and manuscripts of the influential devotional treatise Ancrene Wisse, written for laywomen in early thirteenth-century England, and then discusses how this audience could have been educated to attain such literacy by presenting evidence of women's education from historical and literary sources—including the Tretiz of Walter of Bibbesworth, which provides insight into the education of women in the home.
Guest Blog
Have you heard of medieval anchoresses? Most people haven’t. Anchoritism was a fascinating (and odd) phenomenon that happened all across Western Europe and has roots in the early Christian desert hermit tradition. An anchoress was a laywoman who wanted to withdraw from secular life and live instead in solitude, enclosed in a small room attached to an exterior wall of a church or castle, devoting the rest of her earthly life to Christian devotion and such works of service as she could perform from her cell (embroidering liturgical cloths is one example). She would have required a patron or an income from landholdings or other source to support her needs, such as food, water, and clothing. Among women this phenomenon was first documented in England in the twelfth century and became an increasingly popular choice that continued well into the sixteenth.
Guest Blog
Along oyster beds, sand dunes, and marshy coastal lowlands rise the church spires and walls of a medieval coastal city. This isn’t Northumbria’s Holy Island or Normandy’s Mont-St-Michel, though. This is the City of St. Augustine, Florida, the oldest city continuously occupied by Europeans and African-Americans in North America. This settlement on Florida’s First Coast predates the arrival of the Mayflower pilgrims at Plymouth in 1620 and even the 1607 founding of Jamestown, the first permanent English settlement.
Guest Blog
Few people, even Floridians, know about the medieval roots of St. Augustine discussed in my previous blog. In fact, if you’re planning a trip there and you Google “medieval St. Augustine,” you’ll only get results for the city’s Medieval Torture Museum or for the antique Christian philosopher St. Augustine of Hippo. As readers of this blog know well, though, there is far more to any society, medieval or otherwise, than its methods of policing and punishment. Allow me, then, to take you on a medievalist’s tour of St. Augustine!
Journal Article
The thirteenth-century English manuscript London, British Library, Cotton MS Nero A.xiv (“Nero”) is one of four complete thirteenth-century manuscripts of the well-known early Middle English text Ancrene Wisse, a
guidebook for anchoresses. A close codicological look at the manuscript reveals a bevy of new, heretofore unremarked-on evidence that changes how we must perceive the history and use of the text and the manuscript. The evidence speaks to Nero’s role as what I call here a working book, used in at least one anchorhold in its early years.
Book
Curteise ert e enseigné: Laywomen's Learning and Literacy in the High Middle Ages
Under consideration with Oxford University Press