This study of medieval nuns and abbesses as scribes focuses on manuscript evidence from post-Conquest England, especially in relation to changing institutional ownership. Looking initially at an early-twelfth-century legal manuscript from St Paulߣs London (Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 383), the essay draws our attention to short texts that were subsequently added to it by one ߢMatildaߣ for the benefit of a female audience. Similar additions are made to another manuscript (London, British Library, Cotton MS Vespasian D. xiv) which contains homilies and saintsߣ lives, this time by an ߢancillaߣ or nun, who inserted prayers that she had authored herself sometime in the late twelfth century. These findings are important because there is very little proof of womenߣs scribal activity in medieval England: hitherto scholars have assumed that manuscripts are written and glossed by men.

This essay addresses women and medicine in the Middle Ages, especially works concerning the female body and reproduction. Positive representations of the female body are found in the mystical writings of, for example, the thirteenth-century nuns of Helfta and Mechthild of Hackeborn, and, in contrast to later gynaecological works, which were often deeply misogynistic, Hildegard of Bingenߣs medical texts ascribe a redemptive quality to womenߣs reproductive processes. Most medical treatises, however, were not written for women, and even women involved in health care, including midwives, had little access to them. The Trotula, a compendium on womenߣs medicine taking its name from the twelfth-century woman physician Trota, was widely disseminated and translated as a whole and in parts, but although early Latin versions were addressed to women, later versions were owned largely by men. Nevertheless, there is some evidence of female readership and audiences, and the translation of medical treatises about women into the vernacular increased womenߣs access to this important form of textual knowledge.

The introduction explores womenߣs authorship and addresses the range of works by or attributed to women that were in circulation in England in the Middle Ages in the context of their contributions to a multilingual and inclusive literary culture. It examines the importance of collaboration, arguing that womenߣs writings may be collaborative in different ways: through amanuenses, through translation and adaptation, and through their historical and literary relationships with the men who write their lives. It explores other collaborative aspects of womenߣs literary culture, including womenߣs contributions as patrons, scribes, readers, and subjects of texts. It considers the importance of womenߣs religious communities, as well as the ways in which devotional books were owned by women and exchanged between nuns and by lay women, and it considers the active engagement of women with secular writing as owners and commissioners of books as well as writers. It argues that English womenߣs networks extend from Britain to the Continent and beyond.