Jocelyn Wogan-Browne

My project is a monograph on late medieval women in England as multilingual cultural agents and producers.  Like other European countries, England has its own varied multilingual past, but work with English-language sources dominates most research on its literary culture in the later Middle Ages. Taking account of women’s French-language texts and practices challenges monoglot literary history and gives access to further domains of women’s agency.  Since most women were excluded from Latinity, women’s multilingualism is different from men’s, but in studying under-researched texts and documents associated with women, my account of gendered multilingualism seeks to cast light on late medieval England’s culture as a whole.  My aim is not to create a separate feminized space, but rather to open up women’s participation in a multilingual society’s changing configurations of language, literature, and documentation and to show how it complicates nation-state cultural studies.