Julian of Norwich

In the light of their thirteen years of work on the critical edition of Showings, Colledge and Walsh give us this first modern English rendering from their critical text.

After explaining how and why women have been excluded from the rhetorical tradition from antiquity through the Renaissance, Cheryl Glenn provides the opportunity for Sappho, Aspasia, Diotima, Hortensia, Fulvia, Julian of Norwich, Margery Kempe, Margaret More Roper, Anne Askew, and Elizabeth I to speak with equal authority and as eloquently as Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, and Augustine. Her aim is nothing less than regendering and changing forever the history of rhetoric.

To that end, Glenn locates women's contributions to and participation in the rhetorical tradition and writes them into an expanded, inclusive tradition. She regenders the tradition by designating those terms of identity that have promoted and supported men's control of public, persuasive discourse -- the culturally constructed social relations between, the appropriate roles for, and the subjective identities of women and men.

Glenn is the first scholar to contextualize, analyze, and follow the migration of women's rhetorical accomplishments systematically. To locate these women, she follows the migration of the Western intellectual tradition from its inception in classical antiquity and its confrontation with and ultimate appropriation by evangelical Christianity to its force in the medieval Church and in Tudor arts and politics.

Graphic portrayals of the suffering Jesus Christ pervade late medieval English art, literature, drama, and theology. These images have been interpreted as signs of a new emphasis on the humanity of Jesus. To others they indicate a fascination with a terrifying God of vengeance and a morbid obsession with death. In The Grief of God, however, Ellen Ross offers a different understanding of the purpose of this imagery and its meaning to the people of the time. Analyzing a wide range of textual and pictorial evidence, the author finds that the bleeding flesh of the wounded Savior manifests divine presence; in the intensified corporeality of the suffering Jesus whose flesh not only condemns, but also nurtures, heals, and feeds, believers meet a trinitarian God of mercy. Ross explores the rhetoric of transformation common to English medieval artistic, literary, and devotional sources. The extravagant depictions of pain and anguish, the author shows, constitute an urgent appeal to respond to Jesus' expression of love. She also explains how the inscribing of Christ's pain on the bodies of believers at times erased the boundaries between human and divine so that holy persons, and in particular, holy women, participated in the transformative power of Christ. In analyzing the dialects of mercy and justice; the construction of sacred space and time; sacraments and ritual celebration, social action, and divine judgment; and the dynamics of women's public religious authority, this study of religion and culture explores the meaning of the late medieval Christian affirmation that God bled and wept and suffered on the cross to draw persons to Godself. This interdisciplinary study of sermon literature, manuscript illuminations and church wall paintings, drama, hagiographic narratives, and spiritual treaties illuminates the religious sensibilities, practices, and beliefs that constellate around the late medieval fascination with the bleeding body of the suffering Jesus Christ.

These pages capture a thousand years of devotional and visionary writing by medieval women. The writers come from all different backgrounds and traditions, and they include founders of religious communities, hermits and recluses, wives and mothers, wandering teachers, heretics and reformers. What they all had in common was a belief that they had been chosen to speak, and here we have the evidence of their visions and experiences of the divine. Covering a span of time from late antiquity to the 15th century, the writings include examples of lyric poetry, drama (including the first play written by a woman), epics, saints' lives, and letters. as well as some newly invented genres such as the spiritual autobiography, the guide to prayer, progression of visions, and in Inquisition depositions. A new portrait of the female writer in the Middle Ages emerges, a more accurate portrait than was ever before possible, as many of these texts have either been out of print or are here translated for the first time. We see women writers of the Middle Ages doing what they did best: writing devotional, visionary, and erotic literature from a very personal viewpoint, and what they say to the modern reader has much to do with nature of creativity and the creative experience of women.

Women have been writing in the Catholic tradition since early medieval times, yet no single volume has brought together critical evaluations of their works until now. The first reference of its kind, Catholic Women Writers provides biographical, critical, and bibliographical entries on 64 Catholic women writers from around the world and across the centuries. Each entry is written by an expert contributor and is designed to acquaint the reader with the author, her major works, her Catholic and women's themes, and her critical reception. An introductory essay places the authors in the context and tradition of Catholic writing, and a selected, general bibliography lists works for further reading.