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.

New research into medieval women from the Anglo-Saxon to the late medieval period demonstrates their energy, defiance and wit. The phenomenon of medieval women's middle age is a stage in the lifecycle that has been frequently overlooked in preference for the examination of female youth and old age. The essays collected here, ranging from the Anglo-Saxon to the late medieval period, and drawing variously from literary studies, history, law, art and theology, address this lacuna. Taking a variety of critical approaches, the contributors consider medieval definitions, paradigms andexperiences of female middle age, analysing how the middle-aged woman perceived herself subjectively, as well as how she was perceived by others. They seek to challenge the received wisdom that in the middle ages, at forty, womenwere deemed "old" and, from that point onwards, their thoughts should be focused on preparing for death. On the contrary, this collection demonstrates their energy, defiance and wit. Sue Niebrzydowski is Lecturer in English, Bangor University, Wales. Contributors: Jane Geddes, Clare A. Lees, Carol M. Meale, Anneke B. Mulder-Bakker, Sue Niebrzydowski, Raluca L. Radulescu, Sara Elin Roberts, Corinne Saunders, Diane Watt.

The Yearbook of English Studies 2013 is devoted to early English drama, ranging from what is generally understood as 'medieval' to plays of the early Tudor period, while also including chapters on modern theatrical responses to the surviving corpus of texts. The volume is edited by Pamela King (Professor of English at the University of Glasgow), Sue Niebrzydowski (Senior Lecturer in Medieval English Literature at Bangor University, Wales) and Diana Wyatt (Research Associate at the University of Durham). This rich and varied collection is deliberately loosely ordered in order to encourage the reader to think again about the old canonical categories, particularly 'mysteries' and 'moralities'. The authors lead the reader to engage with recent scholarship in the field which has, for example, drawn on archival research into lost plays to question old certainties about genre, about chronology, and about evolution, and which has taken another look at surviving texts in ways that resist categorization, and found them to be more problematic than hitherto assumed. This volume does not aim to offer coverage of new work in a known field, so there is, for example, no essay dedicated to the York Cycle, although references to it are shot through the whole. Rather, individual chapters reflect not only their authors' specialist sub-fields but also a variety of approaches, from the study of sources and the materiality of surviving witnesses to the texts, to various critical readings and approaches, to studies in the history of staging. In addition, essays on modern productions stake the claim for a new and distinct area in the study of medievalism, as modern authors and producers draw inspiration from the original early scripts. The reader will encounter old favourites in this volume - the Towneley Plays, the Chester Cycle, The Castle of Perseverance, Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis, to name a few - as well as Bewnans Ke, the Cornish saint's play discovered only in 1999, and an intriguing mixture of hagiography and Arthuriana. Equally, the reader will be led to reconsider some lesser-read texts and to encounter traces of wonderful plays which have been lost forever. Overall, the volume seeks to engage with a dramatic tradition which was at once richer and more varied than has been conventionally imagined.