Introduction: Speaking of Past and Present: Giving Voice to Silence

Summary

Catherine Innes-Parker, who died suddenly in September 2019, was best known as a pioneering scholar of anchoritic texts, having written extensively – and from a committed feminist perspective – on the thirteenth-century anchoritic guide Ancrene Wisse and those texts associated with it: in particular, the so-called ‘Wooing Group’ (which she edited to much acclaim in 2015), along with those many derivative texts that extended to a wider readership in the centuries that followed. Most recently, Catherine was working painstakingly on other devotional texts, in particular Bonaventure's Lignum vitae and its vernacular translations for the laity. Throughout her career – and in both professional and personal capacities – Catherine was inspired by a desire to restore a voice to both texts and people – particularly women and their female-coded texts – who had been traditionally silenced, or to those who chose silence as a modus vivendi and/or operandi. She was often ground-breaking in her investigations into how female association with medieval devotional works could – and still can – offer entrance into the worlds of medieval women and a better understanding of them.

To commemorate and celebrate the pioneering work of this deeply respected and much-admired scholar, this volume brings together specially commissioned essays by some of the most expert and experienced scholars in the field, alongside others in earlier career stages but already following in Catherine's footsteps. All of these contributors, moreover, either worked and collaborated with Catherine at some point in their careers – or else are deeply indebted to her work in their own scholarship. For reasons articulated above, they also come together under the overarching aegis of ‘giving voice to silence’, reflecting both the research interests of Catherine and also their own. In many cases, they move well beyond The Wooing Group, Ancrene Wisse and associated texts to give voice to other marginalized works subject to a type of silencing, both in their own day and within subsequent literary historiography. Not only do these essays continue along the research pathways forged by Catherine in their giving voice to some of those writers and readers from the medieval past whose work has been overlooked, misunderstood or else remained undiscovered, but each contribution will also investigate in one way or another what silence meant within – and to – the medieval imaginary, particularly concerning the realm of what we now sometimes term female ‘mysticism’ and other forms of female-coded spirituality: affective meditation, purgatorial visionary experience, vernacular translation, etc.