Catherine Innes-Parker had a gift for honouring distinguished women scholars by reading them deeply, and so it is only fitting, and indeed now urgent, for us to do the same for her. In a brilliant essay on widowhood and the Corpus revisions of Ancrene Wisse written to celebrate Margaret Wade Labarge, Innes-Parker re-evaluated Eric Dobson's somewhat discredited thesis regarding the anchoress sisters, Loretta and Annora de Braose, and the early dedicatees of Ancrene Wisse. Instead, Innes-Parker astutely argued that the de Braose sisters exemplified:

Innovatively using modern approaches to manuscript ownership and trans-mission, she found new meaning in Dobson's intriguing but troubled thesis. I have always been grateful to Innes-Parker for her characteristically kind and professional reading: not long before his death, Professor Dobson (another characteristically kind person) had taught me and many other green postgrad-uates at Oxford his introductory course on Textual Criticism (1978–9), drawing on his deep knowledge of the editorial challenges of Ancrene Wisse, and his unfailing love for its prose. I like to imagine now what great conversa-tions he and Catherine are having in a more ‘peaceable kingdom’.

Innes-Parker's 2011 essay, however, is so multi-faceted that I’ve since returned to it many times, more recently for a new literary history of medieval Oxford, a topic mostly studied as an impregnable male domain. Innes- Parker, however, had been interested in reconstructing intelligent women's thought in the Oxford area (Iffley and Godstow) and in how women recluses interacted with several major male theologians. The broader implications of her essay, I believe, have yet to be fully realized, given that her widows ‘were women of consequence – socially well-connected, wealthy, sophisticated, politically astute, and theologically knowledgeable’. She manages to change our sense of these enclosed women: no longer just the passive recipients of clerical guidance, Innes-Parker's recluses had agency, wielding power as patronesses and learned women in their own right. In the wake of her work, it is no longer possible to regard women in the anchorholds as peripheral to society, or indeed as silent.

CIVIL SERVICE LITERARY CULTURE AND MEDIEVAL ENGLISH IN IRELAND: THE BACKGROUND

Ever since the pioneering work of R. H. Robbins, scholars have known that Franciscan friars were largely responsible for collecting and often composing many of the Early Middle English lyrics recorded 1220–1350. For Ireland's Early Middle Hiberno-English (EMHE) poems, the case for Franciscan agency is even more compelling, indeed, assumed to be nearly absolute, especially since survivals before the famous BL MS Harley 913 lyrics (c. 1330) are scant. However, a closer look at pre-Harley EMHE manuscripts changes some of these assumptions. In fact, the Franciscans were not alone in their interest in the nascent Hiberno-English lyric, and as I will argue here, some betray bureaucratic or civic origins, either in poetic content, or in scribal treatment, having been recorded in documentary hands. Given the distinguished contributions our honouree, Linne Mooney, has made to present understanding of the role of civic writingoffice culture in Middle English literature, it seems appropriate in tribute to her to bring this lesser known corner of the civic literary world into view.

Despite its famous and iron-clad Franciscan credentials, even Harley 913 itself contains lyrics with detailed civic and bureaucratic content. Moreover, in a recent survey of Middle Hiberno-English literary texts, John Thompson quotes M. R. James's catalogue descriptions of Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 405 and London, Lambeth Palace Library (LPL), MS 557, noting that both had lyrics recorded ‘in a charter hand’. More recently, I examined these ‘charter hand’ lyrics as part of the corpus of EMHE texts, noting that neither of these manuscripts is Franciscan. In Corpus 405, the content of one of the lyrics even relates directly to the documents copied by the same scribe nearby, and may be his own rough composition. In LPL 557, perhaps a diocesan manuscript, the charter hand copied two lyrics of stunning quality. So, this essay takes up the question of what role early bureaucrats might have played in the copying, composing, reading and owning of some of Ireland's very earliest English lyrics.

Arguing for medieval women as intellectuals is a battle fraught with perils from all sides and even at times subject to friendly fire. Since women were normally denied access to public educational institutions, gateways to most leadership positions, modern scholars have naturally tended to study learned women as simply anomalies and medieval women, generally, as victims. The concept of women intellectuals, therefore, can be subject to critique as unwarranted extrapolation from the “exceptional few,” or, more broadly, a gesture of disloyalty to the memory of gender victimization. This volume, however, while always respectful of the historical truths and theoretical positions supporting these views, argues instead for a via media – not least because the evidence is not yet all in. The digital revolution is making new medieval manuscript and archival sources available daily, and scholars of medieval women are reaching further afield for more multidisciplinary methods. We suggest here that, if we look more closely, more medieval women attained some form of learning than scholars often assume and that women with legal, social, or ecclesiastical knowledge in turn often also wielded professional or communal leadership.

This volume is intentionally trans-disciplinary, involving contributors from the fields of literature, history, and religion. It challenges several traditional views: first, the still-prevalent idea that women's intellectual accomplishments were limited to the Latin literate. We take for granted the major Latin women writers because, happily, other studies of them already abound; so, too, studies of queens, the one group of medieval women whose learning and leadership have been well canvassed. With respect to Latin, as Megan J. Hall notes here in her essay on the Latinity of early women readers of Ancrene Wisse (Chapter 15), “the predominant language of literacy was shifting.” So, too, our ideas of what constitutes intellectual accomplishment for women must shift. This collection therefore engages heavily with vernacular writings (in Anglo-Saxon, Middle English, French, Dutch, German, and Italian) and also with material culture (manuscript illumination, stained glass, fabric, and jewelry) for evidence of women's advanced capabilities. But in doing so – and here is our second challenge to traditional views – we strive to avoid a different kind of trap: the view that women's accomplishments were limited to the vernacular and the material, a view related in part to decades of scholarly emphasis on the “embodiment” of women's experience.

As anyone knows who regularly reads manuscripts, and especially miscellanies, vast numbers of texts and authors go unidentified in medieval transmission. As E. P. Goldschmidt wrote long ago: “Whoever enters upon any investigation in the field … cannot fail to be bewildered by the extraordinary uncertainty and elusive fluidity of the authors’ names. Almost every other book seems to be known habitually under a name which cannot possibly be that of its true author.” Anonymous, then, is our most prolific medieval author, but somehow “Anonymous” nearly always gets voted male. There are, of course, many reasonable excuses for this, and the obstacles to recovering medieval women's authorship remain enormous. But the chapters in Part III demonstrate, often magisterially, solutions to the many conundrums scholars face in recovering women's authorship. Together they function almost as a masterclass in the art, pedagogically so helpful that I’ve tried to enumerate their techniques in the hope that other scholars will see parallel possibilities elsewhere and apply them to future cases.

In “A Woman Author? The Middle-Dutch Dialogue between a ‘Good-willed Layperson’ and a ‘Master Eckhart’” (Chapter 8), John Van Engen brings us an anonymous Dialogue ostensibly between an unnamed layperson and “Eckhart,” a whopping great text some 60,000 words in length. The text contains tantalizing parallels to Marguerite Porete's theology and, I would note, was written during the single most dangerous medieval period for dissenters (the first quarter of the fourteenth century). One could add that during this time, Porete and her book were tragically burnt, the papal decrees known as the Clementines were published, and persecutions of beguines, Franciscan Spirituals, Joachite thinkers, and countless university academics (at Oxford, Paris, Cologne, and elsewhere) arose – persecutions that only increased as the vicious papacy of John XXII got fully underway by 1317. It is not an accident then, I think, that both the Dialogue Van Engen discusses, and the Bridget of Autrey text Nicholas Watson discusses here too, were produced at exactly this time, both bearing a history of censorship in some way.

We take up here an issue that is becoming increasingly urgent for New Formalist studies: how verse is lineated or set out in surviving medieval manuscripts, and how the decisive moment of arranging a text on the page reveals an authorial or scribal awareness of transitions in form. In such moments, we argue, authors or scribes looked both backward toward their forebears for inspiration and also outward toward new multicultural influences as English poetry developed. As the work of Ardis Butterfield and many other scholars of manuscript studies over three decades has shown, contextualizing poetic form in its manuscript presentation illuminates the “poetically engaging” moment when the pre-written, notional sense of a poem “is negotiated into written form by medieval poets.” In the (re)turn to formalism, the urgency of this contextualization lies in our collective interest in preserving the benefits that decades of historical and historicist scholarship have given to the field, in no small way thanks to interest in manuscripts. New Criticism operated in a world largely innocent of manuscript studies: manuscripts were considered important only to editors, whose job was to mediate between the inconvenient, often obscure manuscript page and the comforts of modern print. While mid-twentieth-century scholars usually had enough old-school philology to know that editors had regularized Middle English orthography, they had little interest in how their editors had regulated form, creating metrically tidy lyrics even where a scribe had emphasized fluidity or its playful possibilities. And even New Criticism's editors regarded paleography as the purview of a handful of temporarily useful specialists, who, they imagined, had little to contribute beyond transcription and dating. Paleography for vernacular texts was also slow to develop: in his memoirs, for instance, George Kane records the great difficulty he had even finding a paleographer willing to deal with Middle English when he was first editing the A-text of Piers Plowman. All that began to change only when innovative paleographers such as Malcolm Parkes and Ian Doyle began to excavate medieval terminology for book organization (e.g., the term ordinatio, stemming from the Oxford requirement that medieval lecturers discuss the organization and structure of a prescribed text), and when editors such as Derek Pearsall began to realize that manuscripts did not just transmit stories, but could also tell them.