Women and the Divine in Literature before 1700: Essays in Memory of Margot Louis (E L S MONOGRAPH SERIES)

Margot Kathleen Louis (1954–2007) published largely as a scholar of Victorian poetry, but medieval literature was her first love, and an abiding passion she shared enthusiastically with students, audiences and colleagues throughout her entire career. But medieval English literature, as it was studied in 1976, included as yet no women authors, and virtually no dissenting or religiously radical writing – in short, none of the kinds of texts that she most valued. In Victorian literature she found more of what she would later call the “anguished and passionate debate that mediated the shift from various forms of Christianity to a far greater spiritual diversity.” Focusing on the role of allegory, myth, visionary experience, and the feminine divine in the medieval imagination, this volume seeks to pay tribute to Louis’ fascination with the rise of literary studies involving early women writers, which brought with it an opening up of the pre-1700 canon to both gender and religious pluralism. The present volume seeks to marry her love of early women writers with her other great passion, women’s literary and pedagogical challenges to male-dominated religious traditions.