During the last years of her life, Catherine Innes-Parker's intellectual passions revolved around the popular Bonaventuran text, the Lignum vitae, in all its many manifestations. In particular, her work focused on the Middle English adaptation of the Latin text, þe Passioun of Oure Lord, found in Cambridge, St John's College, MS G.20 and New York, Columbia University, MS Plimpton 256. In her work on this much understudied translation of the highly popular original, Innes-Parker left an enduring legacy in terms of how we understand the ways in which such writing and its translation were adapted to fit a new lay audience in England in the later Middle Ages.

In this essay, I wish to take up a strand of analysis left relatively unexplored: that is, how þe Passioun's central metaphorical system of the Tree of Life slots into an important and often ambiguously gendered image-set within medieval writings, the less orthodox aspects of which have largely remained silent, both within contemporary scholarship and in their own day – but which, I propose, ultimately informed the text's enthusiastic reception in England. As I shall suggest, within the inherently unstable imagistic schema to which it adheres, the original concept of the lignum vitae [Tree of Life] developed exegetically out of its Edenic roots in the Book of Genesis and the Book of Revelation, not only into a dominant – and dominating – patriarchal figura of genealogical ‘arborescent logic’ (to use a term coined by contemporary theorists Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari), but, in the works of some women writers and a number of other strongly female-coded texts, also found its voice as a different type of symbol, one more in tune with the culturally feminine concepts of nurture and flourishing. Thus, while þe Passioun appears to be utterly dependent upon the ‘logic’ of the male-identified Tree for its structuration (and thus, its directed meanings), I shall suggest that, as part of the ‘evolution’ (or mouvance) from Lignum vitae to versions of þe Passioun that so preoc-cupied the work of Innes-Parker, it was able to hollow out and ultimately give voice to a new position for itself, one, moreover, that was deeply embroiled within the poetics and dynamics of late medieval English affective spirituality.

Catherine Innes-Parker, who died suddenly in September 2019, was best known as a pioneering scholar of anchoritic texts, having written extensively – and from a committed feminist perspective – on the thirteenth-century anchoritic guide Ancrene Wisse and those texts associated with it: in particular, the so-called ‘Wooing Group’ (which she edited to much acclaim in 2015), along with those many derivative texts that extended to a wider readership in the centuries that followed. Most recently, Catherine was working painstakingly on other devotional texts, in particular Bonaventure's Lignum vitae and its vernacular translations for the laity. Throughout her career – and in both professional and personal capacities – Catherine was inspired by a desire to restore a voice to both texts and people – particularly women and their female-coded texts – who had been traditionally silenced, or to those who chose silence as a modus vivendi and/or operandi. She was often ground-breaking in her investigations into how female association with medieval devotional works could – and still can – offer entrance into the worlds of medieval women and a better understanding of them.

To commemorate and celebrate the pioneering work of this deeply respected and much-admired scholar, this volume brings together specially commissioned essays by some of the most expert and experienced scholars in the field, alongside others in earlier career stages but already following in Catherine's footsteps. All of these contributors, moreover, either worked and collaborated with Catherine at some point in their careers – or else are deeply indebted to her work in their own scholarship. For reasons articulated above, they also come together under the overarching aegis of ‘giving voice to silence’, reflecting both the research interests of Catherine and also their own. In many cases, they move well beyond The Wooing Group, Ancrene Wisse and associated texts to give voice to other marginalized works subject to a type of silencing, both in their own day and within subsequent literary historiography. Not only do these essays continue along the research pathways forged by Catherine in their giving voice to some of those writers and readers from the medieval past whose work has been overlooked, misunderstood or else remained undiscovered, but each contribution will also investigate in one way or another what silence meant within – and to – the medieval imaginary, particularly concerning the realm of what we now sometimes term female ‘mysticism’ and other forms of female-coded spirituality: affective meditation, purgatorial visionary experience, vernacular translation, etc.

Liz Herbert McAvoyߣs essay on women visionaries highlights the importance of community in relation to womenߣs literary culture, in particular textual community. McAvoy adopts Karen Baradߣs terminology of dynamic intra-actions to describe the lives and writings of visionaries in the European high and later Middle Ages, taking as her starting point the complex and manifold spiritual female entanglements across space and time that are described in The Book of Margery Kempe. McAvoy traces such intra-actions back through Mechthild of Hackeborn and the nuns of Helfta in the thirteenth century to Hildegard of Bingen in the eleventh, and forwards to the later fourteenth century and Julian of Norwich. McAvoy also identifies the influence of Mechthild on A Revelation of Purgatory, written in the early fifteenth century by an anchoress of Winchester, and on the writings of Birgitta of Sweden, with which Kempe was familiar. McAvoy concludes that these interwoven spiritual connections between women are mirrored in knotted patterns of manuscript patronage and ownership.