Essays on women and devotional literature in the Middle Ages in commemoration and celebration of the respected feminist scholar Catherine Innes-Parker. Silence was a much-lauded concept in the Middle Ages, particularly in the context of religious literature directed at women. Based on the Pauline prescription that women should neither preach nor teach, and should at all times keep speech to a minimum, the concept of silence lay at the forefront of many devotional texts, particularly those associated with various forms of women's religious enclosure. Following the example of the Virgin Mary, religious women were exhorted to speak seldom, and then only seriously and devoutly. However, as this volume shows, such gendered exhortations to silence were often more rhetorical than literal. The contributions range widely: they consider the English 'Wooing Group' texts and female-authored visionary writings from the Saxon nunnery of Helfta in the thirteenth century; works by Richard Rolle and the Dutch mystic Jan van Ruusbroec in the fourteenth century; Anglo-French treatises, and books housed in the library of the English noblewoman Cecily Neville in the fifteenth century; and the resonant poetics of women from non-Christian cultures. But all demonstrate the ways in which silence, rather than being a mere absence of speech, frequently comprised a form of gendered articulation and proto-feminist point of resistance. They thus provide an apt commemoration and celebration of the deeply innovative work of Catherine Innes-Parker (1956-2019), the respected feminist scholar and a pioneer of this important field of study.

The Boke of Gostely Grace is a Middle English translation of the Liber specialis gratiae by the German visionary Mechthild of Hackeborn (1241–1298), a Benedictine nun at the convent of Helfta (now in Germany). This new Companion will add momentum to the current interdisciplinary and theoretical debate surrounding Latin texts and their translations into the vernacular, including a number of issues regarding women’s literary culture. It compliments and supplements the new critical edition of the text, The Boke of Gostely Grace, edited by Naoë Kukita Yoshikawa and Anne Mouron with Mark Atherton, published by Liverpool University Press in 2022. A comprehensive introduction is followed by three parts. Part 1 examines vernacular translations of the Liber specialis gratiae from the late medieval and early modern periods in German, Dutch, Swedish, Italian, and French. Part 2 explores a wide-range of critical issues in The Boke of Gostely Grace, and in particular aspects of the spirituality of Helfta. The volume concludes in Part 3 with aspects of the Last Things at Helfta, more specifically purgatorial piety and the theme of the dying and the dead. The volume as a whole provides a new and nuanced understanding of how the mystical literary output of Helfta circulated and was received in the late medieval literary culture of England and Europe.