The French of the English and Early British Women s Literary Culture

Anglo-Norman studies are crucial to reconstructing women s participation in Britain s literary culture because the language and literature owe so much to women s creative and practical endeavour, as patrons, teachers, audiences, and writers. Recent valuable work is rethinking Britain s multilingual culture, rewriting uncritical assumptions about historical breaks and cultural hostilities; female patronage, for example, effects significant affiliations and continuities between Anglo-Saxon and Norman cultures in the eleventh and twelfth centuries.1 General readers have hardly been aware of women s writing in Anglo-Norman, let alone appreciated it, because Anglo-Norman itself can appear anomalous in traditional models of literary history, with, inter alia, their rigid and exclusive associations of language with national identity, and also because only recently have these texts been available in translation. But the work of these important, often trend-setting, poets, with their self-consciousness about their art, their sensitive handling of octosyllabic verse, and their acknowledgement of their reading communities, urges fresh awareness of female authorship s contribution to the participatory cultural dynamic of literature, in the later twelfth century and beyond.