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Women’s Literary Culture and the Late Medieval English Canon: Introduction

Over the last three decades medieval women's writing has become a significant focus of scholarly research. Women's literary culture in England in the later Middle Ages, and the influence of continental European women writers in Britain have been painstakingly charted. Simultaneously, considerable research has been undertaken into the work of Chaucer, his predecessors, contemporaries, and successors. Chaucer's working practices, his relationship with his scribes, patrons, and audiences have all been subject to close and necessary scrutiny, as has the European context of Chaucer's work. Yet, while there have been numerous informative studies of women or gender in the work of Chaucer and his contemporaries, to a significant extent research into women's writing and Chaucerian literature have existed in parallel. The established " canon " of medieval English literature has remained fundamentally unchallenged by the emergence of scholarship on medieval women's writing. In order to contest this dichotomy of criticism, this Special Issue of The Chaucer Review brings together essays by scholars who work both on canonical medieval writers (including Chaucer, the Pearl-poet, and Thomas Hoccleve) and on women's literary culture in England and Europe. Our main objective in breaking down the divide between so-called female and male literary traditions in the period is to call into question the idea that these apparently different and separate literary cultures constitute a hierarchical binary, with women's writing – with some notable exceptions – seen by and large as non-canonical. In so doing we seek to reexamine and re-evaluate the assumptions and values that ground the established canon of late medieval texts. Our revision of literary history challenges the idea of parallel traditions by asking what the male