An image of Chinese writer, Ban Zhao, as featured on Early Modern Women Writers

When I tell people that I research women writers from the Middle Ages, they generally give me a blank stare – “But did women write during the Middle Ages?” The answer to this question is more complicated than it sounds. It also leads to another question – “What is writing?”

During the Middle Ages, composing a work – that is, generating ideas – was considered a more sophisticated act than the mere writing of letters on a page. There were women in Europe who physically wrote down their thoughts long before the advent of print. At the same time, there were also women who were not necessarily literate, but who dictated their ideas to scribes and patronised literary works. These acts also fell within the purview of ‘writing’.

So, my answer to those who look confused when I tell them what I do is: “Yes, women did write.” Medieval women were far more engaged in literary cultures than most people realise – especially if we broaden our understanding of writing to include other forms of generating ideas.

In academic settings, the study of medieval women’s writing is a relatively significant subfield. Some of this work is devoted to analysing particular examples of women’s writing in academic journals. There is also a simultaneous effort to make this writing and its composers known to broader audiences. To this end, digital tools have become particularly useful.

In 2017, wanting to share knowledge of pre-modern women writers with broader audiences and increase academic collaboration, I started a project called Early Modern Women Writers. Working with scholars from China, Japan, and the Middle East, I compiled a database with more than 200 entries on women writers between 500 and 1500 CE.

Working with these scholars, I discovered a network of women who were engaging with religion, politics, and the history of ideas, all before 1500 CE. I learned, for instance, about the daughter of Emperor Alexius I Anna Komnene, who was a Byzantine historian. I also learned about Ban Zhao, an early Chinese writer who composed a book titled Lessons for Women, a popular guide for women’s behaviour in the Chinese court. To these entries, I added my own – on medieval mystics from Germany and writers of romance from France and England.

This database is currently housed on Omeka, an open-source web publishing platform for sharing digital collections. Using Omeka does not require a background in computer science – I was able to create a database with entries for each of my authors, which makes it easy for users to browse. They can also search for particular categories based on genre, time period, and geography. The site, therefore, offers casual readers a way to learn more about medieval women writers. It also gives student researchers a starting point for projects on individual writers as well as ideas for comparison.

I have been delighted to involve my students at Ashoka in this project. In the spring of 2019, I taught a course titled Global Medieval Women’s Writing in which students contributed entries to the site. Early Modern Women Writers now includes a wide range of women from the subcontinent – from Karaikkal Ammaiyar in Tamil Nadu to Lalleshwari in Kashmir. While writing these entries, students had to think about what information would be helpful to the general reader and how to make sense of varying accounts of women about whom little is known. They also learnt how to categorise writing into different genres, and comprehend conflicting pieces of information.

Digital tools have given scholars like me an opportunity to share aspects of my work within and outside of academia. Such tools also offer ways for scholars from different disciplines and institutions to connect. I’ve had the privilege of collaborating with colleagues and students working in many different languages across continents. As Early Modern Women Writers continues to expand, I’m hoping to add more features that will enable users to generate conversations between different authors – creating lists of authors who work in a single genre or across similar themes. I’m hopeful that this kind of work will allow for more comparative studies on medieval writing. Most of all I hope that it will enable more people to see that medieval women really did write.

Alexandra Verini is Assistant Professor of English. Her research interests lie in early British literature, women’s writing, and digital humanities. She leads the Early Modern Women Writers project, which is currently expanding to include writers from the Indian subcontinent.