Women Medievalists and the Academy, Volume 1 - Paperback

by Jane Chance (Author)

Long overlooked in standard reference works, pioneering women medievalists finally receive their due in Women Medievalists and the Academy. This comprehensive edited volume brings to life a diverse collection of inspiring figures through memoirs, biographical essays, and interviews. Covering many different nationalities and academic disciplines--including literature, philology, history, archaeology, art history, theology or religious studies, and philosophy--each essay delves into one woman's life, intellectual contributions, and efforts to succeed in a male-dominated field. Together, these extraordinary personal histories constitute a new standard reference that speaks to a growing interest in women's roles in the development of scholarship and the academy. The collection begins in the eighteenth century with Elizabeth Elstob and continues to the present, and includes--among more than seventy profiles--such important figures as Anna Jameson, Lina Eckenstein, Georgiana Goddard King, Eileen Power, Dorothy L. Sayers, Dorothy Whitelock, Susan Mosher Stuard, Marcia Colish, and Caroline Walker Bynum, among others.

Author Biography

Jane Chance is the Andrew W. Mellon Distinguished Professor of English Emerita at Rice University and recipient of an honorary doctorate from Purdue University (2013) as well as NEH and Guggenheim Fellowships. Author or editor of twenty-four other books, she has published Woman as Hero in Old English Literature (1986; rpr. 2005), the prize-winning Medieval Mythography, volumes 1-3 (1994, 2000, 2015) and The Literary Subversions of Medieval Women (2007), as well as Gender and Text in the Later Middle Ages (1996). Her most recent book is Tolkien, Self and Other: "This Queer Creature" (2016). She is also Series Editor of the Library of Medieval Women (Boydell and Brewer), offering classroom translations of works by medieval women.