Abstract
Most medievalists working on English literature would now consider Margery Kempe and Julian of Norwich “canonical.” These two visionaries’ rise in modern popularity, both in research and teaching, shows the impact of the last four decades or so of ground-breaking work on women and their diverse roles in medieval English literature. Some scholars might think the surge in feminist scholarship and the canon wars of the ‘80s and ‘90s to be done, over, old news. Others would disagree. In fact, beyond these two figures, much of the rest of scholarly exploration on women’s literary culture, especially women and religious writing, doesn’t actually seem to have had the same radical effect on mainstream views of what we should read and how we should read – i.e. the canon and canonical reading practices. Why is this? What is still at stake, so many years later, in continuing the push to decentralize the canon away from male, secular writers? What more is there to learn about how “the other half” of the population shaped medieval literature, and why should we care?