This dissertation interrogates the social category of the ‘woman writer’ by reading late medieval women as active participants in a Western literary tradition that has long positioned them as minoritized figures on account of their gender. Beginning with the concept of ‘woman,’ I examine how gender signifiers are used in premodern mystical discourse as tools that exist beyond the body for writers to think and build knowledge with. Premodern writers used gender to contemplate what it means to be a self and to will in relation to God and their community. As existing scholarship has demonstrated, devotional literature often uses what we might call gender fluid language to conceptualize the human soul’s return to divine union. However, this language would also be used to construct an androcentric understanding of what it means to be made in the image of God. I argue the language of gender is a powerful tool that medieval women writers use to remake the self and reimagine themselves in relation to the world in gender plural and diverse ways. Turning to examine three Middle English texts produced by women, I demonstrate how these writers use gender and will as linguistic tools to reconstruct ‘woman’ and reimagine what it means to be a self in relation to the divine and others.
Drawing upon the extended mind thesis of cognitive philosophers Andy Clark and David Chalmers, this study offers a new methodology for reading gender’s epistemic function as a cognitive tool in late medieval literary culture. The extended mind thesis, as I implement it, opens to us another way to read gender as an environmental resource that each writer uses to create new pathways of knowledge and ways of being. Across each chapter, I model what I call a de-minoritized reading praxis that examines the social construction of ‘woman’ and the ‘woman writer’ both in terms of the language used in my primary texts but also the language we use as scholars to study gender in literary history. Such a praxis enables us to re-think how we read gender beyond the signifier of ‘woman’ as, I suggest, the writers of this study invite us to do.
The introduction presents the methodological foundation of this multidisciplinary project by reframing the premodern history of philosophy of mind as an underexamined history of gender. Chapter 1 examines Julian of Norwich’s A Vision a Devout Woman and A Revelation of Divine Love as a narrative arc of willful longing that revises ‘woman’ – not as an un-gendering of self, but as an expansion of ‘woman’ as part of a gender inclusive ‘all’ united in divine love. Chapter 2 considers The Book of Margery Kempe as a narrative of will that remakes the social category of wife through virginity, and in doing so, formulates a language of consent for wives living a mixed life. Chapter 3 turns to examine the Middle English translation of Marguerite Poréte’s Myrrour of Symple Soules by tracing how the English translation engages the text’s gender pronoun logic in order to trace the Soul’s movement toward a gender plural union in divine will. Each of these texts, I argue, are products of extended minds which must be read as a part of – rather than apart from – literary history in order to fully appreciate the complexity of what they contribute to literary culture as a whole.