Medieval Women in Letters: Letters by Women, to Women, and about Women in Medieval Literatures

December 2025

Publications

[voir sur le site de la maison d'édition]

Elisabetta Bartoli (dir.), Utrecht Studies in Medieval Literacy, vol. 66, Brepols, 2025.

The letter was the most widespread means of communication in the Middle Ages and the most practiced literary genre also among women. This volume, produced under the auspices of the Medieval Women in Letters project from the MedioEvA Center (University of Siena, Rome Sapienza and Tours), explores the rhetorical, literary, thematic, and historical-cultural aspects of the female epistolography in the Middle Ages. Latin literature constitutes a cohesive element between the various vernacular languages that were establishing themselves during the Middle Ages, and this volume promotes the study of women’s literature and medieval woman by adopting a consistently comparative and translinguistic method, analyzing women’s literature in all the languages used in medieval Europe.

The methodology focuses on the literary tradition, especially the linguistic and philological spheres. Specialists in Germanic, Middle Latin, Romance, Arabic, Italian, and Byzantine literature discuss published and unpublished female letters, with particular focus on the main challenges that female writing in the Middle Ages presents, including: authorship, the relationship between copyist and author, the degree of female literacy, training structures, the role of writing in the various seasons of the Middle Ages, and the modern critical reception of female epistolography. As a result, this volume seeks to dismantle obsolete critical prejudices and redefine a literary canon that fully includes women.