Initiates a wider development of inquiries into women's literary cultures to move the reader beyond single geographical, linguistic, cultural and period boundaries. Since the closing decades of the twentieth century, medieval women's writing has been the subject of energetic conversation and debate. This interest, however, has focused predominantly on western European writers working within the Christian tradition: the Saxon visionaries, Mechthild of Hackeborn, Mechthild of Magdeburg, Gertrude the Great, for example, and, in England, Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe are cases in point. While this present book acknowledges the huge importance of such writers to women's literary history, it also argues that they should no longer be read solely within a local context. Instead, by putting them into conversation with other literary women and their cultures from wider geographical regions and global cultures - women from eastern Europe and their books, dramas and music; the Welsh gwraig llwyn a pherth (woman of bush and brake); the Indian mystic, Mirabai; Japanese women writers from the Heian period; women saints from across Christian Europe and those of eleventh-century Islam or late medieval Ethiopia; for instance - much more is to be gained in terms of our understanding of the drivers behind and expressions of medieval women's literary activities in far broader contexts. This volume considers the dialogue, synergies, contracts and resonances emerging from such new alignments, and to help a wider, multidirectional development of this enquiry into women's literary cultures.

This interdisciplinary book breaks new ground by systematically examining ways in which two of the most important works of late-medieval English literature - Julian of Norwich's Revelations of Love and William Langland's Piers Plowman - were borne from engagement with the biblical Apocalypse and exegetical writings. This study contends that the exegetical approach to the Apocalypse is more extensive in Julian's Revelations and more sophisticated in Langland's Piers Plowman than previously thought, whether through a primary textual influence or a discernible Joachite influence. The author considers the implications of areas of confluence, which both writers reapply and emphasise - such as spiritual warfare and other salient thematic elements of the Apocalypse, gender issues, and Julian's explications of her vision of the soul as city of Christ and all believers (the fulcrum of her eschatologically-focused Aristotelian and Augustinian influenced pneumatology). The liberal soteriology implicit in Julian's `Parable of the Lord and the Servant' is specifically explored in its Johannine and Scotistic Christological emphasis, the absent vision of hell, and the eschatological `grete dede', vis-a-vis a possible critique of the prevalent hermeneutic.