Liz Herbert McAvoyߣs essay on women visionaries highlights the importance of community in relation to womenߣs literary culture, in particular textual community. McAvoy adopts Karen Baradߣs terminology of dynamic intra-actions to describe the lives and writings of visionaries in the European high and later Middle Ages, taking as her starting point the complex and manifold spiritual female entanglements across space and time that are described in The Book of Margery Kempe. McAvoy traces such intra-actions back through Mechthild of Hackeborn and the nuns of Helfta in the thirteenth century to Hildegard of Bingen in the eleventh, and forwards to the later fourteenth century and Julian of Norwich. McAvoy also identifies the influence of Mechthild on A Revelation of Purgatory, written in the early fifteenth century by an anchoress of Winchester, and on the writings of Birgitta of Sweden, with which Kempe was familiar. McAvoy concludes that these interwoven spiritual connections between women are mirrored in knotted patterns of manuscript patronage and ownership.

This essay explores the insights into female authorship offered by Julian of Norwichߣs Revelations of Divine Love. While we know very little of this figure, external evidence clearly identifies her as an anchoress celebrated for her holiness and spiritual guidance, and she is the first woman writer to use English who can be identified. Windeatt explores the distinctive witnesses to medieval womenߣs literary culture offered by the two extant texts of the Revelations. The shorter version, almost certainly earlier, is explicit about its female authorship, but reflects no particularly female approach. The longer version, by contrast, suppresses reference to female authorship but develops a uniquely woman-centred exposition of deep theological sophistication that suggests extensive learning. The afterlife of Julianߣs Revelations sustains the process of editing, as the short text finds its way into an anthology while excerpts of the Long Text are woven into a florilegium probably for nuns, whilst post-medieval communities of nuns ensure the survival of Julianߣs book.

This Introduction provides an overview of the study as a whole. It argues for an understanding of scholastic biblical commentary in fourteenth-century England as a capacious and creative literary form, one which includes works in Latin and Middle English, and which opens biblical exegesis to more demotic devotional uses. In either language, commentators pick their way shrewdly, knowingly, imaginatively, and selectively among the various resources available to them, weighing the authoritative interpretations of earlier writers even as they seek to experiment with their own new ways of reading. The Introduction considers the relevance of this broadly appealing idea of commentary for our understanding of some of the most familiar works of Middle English religious literature, and it ends with a summary of the chapters that follow.

What is ‘heresy’? One answer would be, ‘that which orthodoxy condemns as such’; though we may also wish to consider when conscious dissent invites such a condemnation. The main ‘heresy’ in late medieval England was that usually termed Lollardy, understood to be inspired by the radical theological thought of John Wyclif (1328-1384), which among other things emphasised the overwhelmingly importance of Scripture, and of lay access to Scripture, through vernacular translation. Orthodox repression of heresy began in the late fourteenth century and developed in various ways in the fifteenth. There are small traces of these much wider battles in Chaucer’s oeuvre, but it would be very hard to say quite how he saw them. We might instead see the fluidity of attitude toward aspects of religion in Chaucer as a sign of his times. ‘Dissent’ can encompass more than that which is solidly decried as heresy, and ‘orthodoxy’ can turn out to be more than one mode of religious thought and expression.

What is ‘heresy’? One answer would be, ‘that which orthodoxy condemns as such’; though we may also wish to consider when conscious dissent invites such a condemnation. The main ‘heresy’ in late medieval England was that usually termed Lollardy, understood to be inspired by the radical theological thought of John Wyclif (1328-1384), which among other things emphasised the overwhelmingly importance of Scripture, and of lay access to Scripture, through vernacular translation. Orthodox repression of heresy began in the late fourteenth century and developed in various ways in the fifteenth. There are small traces of these much wider battles in Chaucer’s oeuvre, but it would be very hard to say quite how he saw them. We might instead see the fluidity of attitude toward aspects of religion in Chaucer as a sign of his times. ‘Dissent’ can encompass more than that which is solidly decried as heresy, and ‘orthodoxy’ can turn out to be more than one mode of religious thought and expression.