Volume 7, Issue 1

This article traces the line between the medieval female reader of Arthurian romance in Scandinavia and the female scholar of today. It draws attention to a number of female patrons and readers of Arthuriana in the Middle Ages, as well as to Queen Christina of Sweden in the seventeenth century. It also discusses the contribution of Scandinavian women to the scholarly field of Arthurian literary study.

This article offers a survey of German Medieval Studies as a discipline, focusing on three generations of women’s German Medieval-Arthurian scholarship. This scholarship demonstrates a breadth of discipline that might be perceived as unusual in contrast to Anglophone or Francophone Arthurian scholarship; this breadth is however characteristic of scholarship in German Medieval Studies. The authors analyse significant publications and female scholars within German Medieval Studies to shed a light on research areas, institutional developments as well as key figures that have emerged in German Arthurian scholarship over the last half-century. The authors conclude not only that the practice of truly interdisciplinary research has become a hallmark of today’s female scholarship, but also that new spaces have been created (and continue to emerge) for women to write, publish and teach in German Medieval-Arthurian scholarship.

This article examines the history of scholarship of both Middle English Arthurian literature and its afterlives to argue that the marginalisation of such literature has slowly diminished – often through the work of women. The increasing numbers of women in academia coincided with the advent of new methodologies in literary studies in the late-twentieth century to produce a wide range of scholarship on English Arthurian literature, including on texts that had long been considered beneath serious study. This work continues now, with recent studies considering English Arthuriana through postcolonial theory, queer theory, affect theory, adaptation studies and many other methods.

This article surveys some of the main contributions of female scholars to the study of Arthurian literature in the Celtic languages from the nineteenth century to the present day. Scholarship by women has been integral to the study of Celtic Arthurian literature since the translations of native Welsh texts by Lady Charlotte Guest. Since then, women’s contributions have been foundational to the field, influencing theories of transmission, analysis and the standard editions of much Arthurian material in Welsh, Irish, Gaelic and Breton. They remain vital to the life of Arthurian scholarship, and the final section addresses contributions by younger scholars whose lasting influence remains to be seen.

Based on documentary research undertaken in the Penguin Archive in the University of Bristol’s Special Collections, this article highlights various ways in which women’s often invisible labour contributed to the publication of editions and translations of medieval and early modern Arthurian literature in the mid- to late-twentieth century. The discussion includes a range of roles and individuals involved in bringing Arthurian literature to publication, including the academics commissioned to undertake translations, the editors and administrators in Penguin’s employ, as well as secretaries, wives, readers and other figures operating outside of Penguin. The article attempts a recuperation of the women’s labour involved in bringing Arthurian literature to the masses, and celebrates their part in the establishment and perpetuation of Arthurian Studies as a discipline.