Former leading New Zealand publisher and bookseller, and widely experienced judge of both the Commonwealth Writers Prize and the Montana New Zealand Book Awards, talks about what he is currently reading, what impresses him and what doesn't, along with chat about the international English language book scene, and links to sites of interest to booklovers.
Tuesday, April 19, 2016
Books by earliest women writers in English on display together for first time
Manuscripts of the first book in English by a woman and the earliest autobiography by a woman are displayed together by Wellcome Collection
A painting of Julian of Norwich on a early 20th century triptych, in All Saints church in East Tuddenham, Norwich. Photograph: Courtesy of The Friends of Julian of Norwich and Felicity Maton
Medieval manuscripts by two of the earliest women writers in English, Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe, are being displayed together for the first time in a new exhibition. The Book of Margery Kempe, which is dated between 1436 and 1438, is Norfolk woman Kempe’s story of her life, dictated to a scribe, and is widely seen as the first autobiography in English. The mother of 14 children, Kempe became a chaste pilgrim after experiencing religious visions, travelling to Jerusalem and Santiago de Compostela while expressing her devotion to Christ through weeping and loud cries.The 14th century anchorite Julian of Norwich wrote Revelations of Divine Love herself after experiencing a series of mystical visions in 1373. The visions included that of “a little thing, the size of a hazel-nut, lying in the palm of my hand ... I looked at it and thought, ‘What can this be?’ And the answer came to me, ‘It is all that is made.’” The book, which Julian wrote in a shorter version, describing the “shewings” she saw and interpreting them, and then in a longer version around 20 years later, is seen as the first by a woman in English. Only one known manuscript exists of Margery Kempe’s story: its whereabouts were unknown from around 1520 until the 1930s, when it was discovered in the cupboard of a country-house during a game of ping-pong. One of the players stepped on the ball and while searching for another, the The Book of Margery Kempe manuscript fell out of a cupboard. It has been stored in the British Library ever since and was digitised by the British Library in 2014. MORE
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