The field of American women's writing is one characterized by innovation: scholars are discovering new authors and works, as well as new ways of historicizing this literature, rethinking contexts and categories. This book develops and challenges historical, cultural, theoretical, even polemical methods, all of which will advance the future study of American women writers – from Native Americans to postmodern communities, from individual careers to communities of writers and readers.
The historians in this collection are looking for ways to expand the ways we examine and write about medieval women. They are interested in the great and the obscure, and women from different times and places. All attempt to get closer to the life as lived, personified in individual stories. As such, these essays prompt us to rethink what we can know about medieval women, how we can know it, and how we can write about them to expand our insights.