The Rediscovery of Medieval Women Writers

In 1934, a manuscript was discovered in a private library. It contained the only surviving copy of The Book of Margery Kempe, the first autobiography in English—written by a woman around 1436. For 500 years, it had been forgotten. Now it's taught in universities worldwide.¹

Margery Kempe's story is not unique. When we analyze Google Ngram data for pre-modern women writers, a striking pattern emerges: most show “modern rediscovery” curves. Nearly invisible in Victorian scholarship, they exploded into prominence after 1980.

The Data

We queried the Google Books Ngram Viewer for 19 medieval and early modern women writers, tracking how often their names and works appear in English-language books from 1800 to 2019. The pattern is unmistakable:

Three Stories of Rediscovery

Marguerite Porete: From Heretic to Mystic

Marguerite Porete was burned at the stake in Paris in 1310. Her crime: writing The Mirror of Simple Souls, a mystical text about the soul's union with God. The book was condemned and supposedly destroyed.

Yet copies survived—anonymously. For centuries, The Mirror circulated attributed to other authors. It was only in 1946 that Romana Guarnieri identified it as Porete's work.² The Ngram data captures this perfectly: virtually zero mentions before 1950, then a 950x increase as scholars recognized her as one of the most original mystical writers of the medieval period.

Christine de Pizan: The First Professional Woman Writer

Christine de Pizan (1364–1430) may have been the first woman in European history to earn her living by writing. Widowed at 25 with three children, she turned to her pen. She wrote over 40 works: poetry, biography, military strategy, political philosophy. Her Book of the City of Ladies (1405) is a systematic defense of women against misogynist literature.

In the Victorian era, she was barely a footnote. The Ngram frequency: 4.4e-10—essentially invisible. By 2019: 1.3e-7, a 280-fold increase. The feminist recovery of Christine de Pizan beginning in the 1970s transformed her from obscurity to canonical status. Her City of Ladies is now standard reading in medieval literature courses.

Teresa of Avila: The Mystic Who Never Left

Not all women writers needed rediscovery. Teresa of Avila (1515–1582) was canonized in 1622, declared a Doctor of the Church in 1970, and has been continuously read for four centuries. Her Interior Castle remains one of the most influential works of Christian mysticism ever written.

The Ngram data shows not rediscovery but sustained growth: 2.9e-9 in the Victorian era to 1.7e-7 today—a 60-fold increase. Teresa wasn't forgotten; she was amplified. As interest in contemplative spirituality grew, so did attention to her work.

What Changed?

The explosion of interest in medieval women writers after 1980 wasn't accidental. Several factors converged:

• Feminist scholarship — The women's movement created demand for recovering women's voices from history. Literary scholars began systematically searching archives for women's writing.
• Manuscript discoveries — The Margery Kempe manuscript (1934), the identification of Marguerite Porete (1946), and other finds provided new texts to study.
• Translation projects — Series like “The Classics of Western Spirituality” (Paulist Press) and “The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe” (University of Chicago) made texts accessible in English.
• Curriculum reform — Universities expanded medieval syllabi beyond the traditional (male) canon, creating pedagogical demand for women's texts.

The Mystics Dominate

A notable pattern: the most prominent medieval women writers are overwhelmingly mystics. Hildegard, Julian, Mechthild, Angela, Birgitta, Marguerite, Teresa—all wrote about direct experience of the divine.

This isn't because women only wrote about mysticism. Christine de Pizan wrote political philosophy. Hrotsvitha wrote plays. Marie de France wrote courtly romances. But mystical writing offered women a unique authority: they could claim divine inspiration that bypassed institutional hierarchies. A woman couldn't be a priest, but she could be a prophet.³

The One Who Peaked Early: Hrotsvitha

Hrotsvitha of Gandersheim (c. 935–1002) is the exception that proves the rule. A Saxon canoness, she wrote six plays in Latin—the first dramas composed in Western Europe since antiquity. Her work was rediscovered in 1494 and caused a sensation among Renaissance humanists.

The Ngram data shows her “Early Modern peak”: maximum attention around 1900–1945, then gradual decline. Why? Hrotsvitha was claimed by a different scholarly tradition—classical philology and theater history—before feminist recovery began. She was already “discovered” by the male academy, which may have paradoxically reduced feminist interest in reclaiming her.

The Victorian Exception: Vittoria Colonna

Vittoria Colonna (1490–1547), the Italian poet and friend of Michelangelo, shows the opposite pattern: more famous in the Victorian era than today. Her Ngram peaked at 8.4e-8 in Victorian times but has declined to 3.4e-8.

Colonna was celebrated in the 19th century as an exemplar of feminine virtue—pious, devoted to her dead husband, friend of great men. As feminist scholars reframed the study of women's writing, this hagiographic framing became less appealing. Colonna's reputation was built on Victorian values that later scholars rejected.

The Early Print Era: 1450–1550

The printing press arrived in 1450. By 1550, approximately 200,000 editions had been printed across Europe. How many were by women? The data from the Incunabula Short Title Catalogue (ISTC) and Universal Short Title Catalogue (USTC) is revealing:

The pattern is stark. The women who made it into print shared common traits: they were either canonized saints (Birgitta, Catherine, Teresa, Angela) or connected to famous men (Heloise with Abelard, Hrotsvitha discovered by humanists). Institutional approval was essential.

The mystics who worked outside institutional structures—Marguerite Porete, Mechthild, the Beguines—survived only in manuscript. When the manuscripts were lost or forgotten, so were they. Margery Kempe's single surviving manuscript was found in a private library 500 years later. How many others weren't so lucky?

This explains the “modern rediscovery” pattern. The women showing 100x–950x growth since Victorian times were never part of the print tradition. They couldn't be “rediscovered” in the 19th century because their texts weren't available. It took 20th-century manuscript studies, feminist scholarship, and translation projects to bring them back.⁵

The Sixteenth Century: A Golden Age?

The picture changes dramatically after 1500. The printing press was established. Humanism encouraged women's education. Italy produced a remarkable generation of women poets; England saw its first women in print; Venetian writers began the modern feminist tradition.

The data reveals three distinct groups:

The always-known: Marguerite de Navarre's Heptameron was never forgotten—it's essentially a female Decameron, and was treated as such. Mary Sidney and Anne Askew were famous in their own time and stayed in the historical record, though both have declined from Victorian-era peaks.

The Italian poets: Veronica Franco, Gaspara Stampa, and the other Italianpoetesse were rediscovered through feminist literary recovery beginning in the 1970s. Franco in particular has benefited from popular culture—the 1998 film Dangerous Beautybrought the Venetian courtesan-poet to a wide audience.

The proto-feminists: Moderata Fonte and Lucrezia Marinella wrote explicit defenses of women's intellectual equality in the Querelle des Femmes tradition. Their works—The Worth of Women (1600) and The Nobility and Excellence of Women(1600)—are now recognized as foundational feminist texts, but were virtually unknown before the 1990s.⁶

The Case of Sor Juana

The most dramatic recovery is Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1648–1695), the Mexican nun and polymath. With 134x growth from Victorian to Digital eras, she represents not just feminist recovery but postcolonial recovery—the rediscovery of colonial Latin American intellectual life. Her Response to Sor Filotea (1691), a defense of women's right to education, is now considered one of the founding documents of Latin American feminist thought.

The Seventeenth Century: English Women in Print

The 17th century produced the first generation of professional English women writers. Aphra Behn (1640–1689) is often called the first professional woman writer in English. Margaret Cavendish (1623–1673) published philosophy, science fiction, and natural philosophy. Mary Wroth (1587–1651) wrote the first prose romance by an English woman.

Aemilia Lanyer: The Biggest Recovery

The single largest recovery in our dataset is Aemilia Lanyer (1569–1645). With 534x growth, she went from complete obscurity to widespread recognition. Her Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum(1611) was the first original book of poetry published by an English woman.

Lanyer was rediscovered in 1973 by A.L. Rowse, who controversially argued she was Shakespeare's “Dark Lady.” While that claim is disputed, it brought attention to her poetry. Subsequent feminist scholarship recognized the work on its own merits: a 200-page poem that includes the first proto-feminist retelling of Eve's fall, arguing that Adam was equally culpable.⁷

What's Still Missing

Despite the recovery, enormous gaps remain:

• Most mystical texts remain in Latin/vernacular only — Even Hildegard, the most famous, has major works untranslated. Her Physica (natural history) doesn't appear in Ngram data at all.
• Letters and minor works — We have Teresa's major treatises but not complete translations of her 400+ letters.
• Non-Western women — This analysis covers only Western European women. Byzantine, Islamic, and Asian women writers remain almost entirely inaccessible in English.
• Anonymous works — How many texts by women circulated without attribution? We may never know what we've lost.

The Work Continues

The rediscovery of medieval women writers is one of the great scholarly achievements of the late 20th century. The Ngram data quantifies what literary historians have long known: we recovered an entire tradition that Victorian scholarship had rendered invisible.

But the recovery is incomplete. Every author on this list has untranslated works. Every tradition has unexplored archives. The tools that enabled 20th-century recovery—feminist theory, manuscript studies, translation—remain essential. AI-assisted translation may accelerate the work. The 280-fold increase in attention to Christine de Pizan happened because scholars made her texts available. The same could happen for the works still locked in Latin and medieval vernaculars.

Margery Kempe was silent for 500 years. How many others are still waiting to speak?

Notes & Sources

1. The manuscript was discovered by Hope Emily Allen in the Butler-Bowdon family library. See Lynn Staley, ed., The Book of Margery Kempe (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 1996), introduction.
2. Romana Guarnieri, “Il movimento del Libero Spirito,” Archivio italiano per la storia della pietà 4 (1965): 351–708. The identification revolutionized the study of medieval mysticism.
3. On women's mystical authority, see Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987).
4. Ngram data queried from Google Books Ngram Viewer, corpus “English (2019)”, smoothing 3, December 2024. Frequency values represent average mentions per billion words within each era. See our interactive visualization for full data.
5. Edition counts from ISTC (Incunabula Short Title Catalogue) for pre-1501 editions, and USTC (Universal Short Title Catalogue) for 1501–1600. Total European print output 1450–1550 estimated at 200,000 editions; see Andrew Pettegree,The Book in the Renaissance (Yale University Press, 2010).
6. On Venetian women writers, see Virginia Cox, Women's Writing in Italy 1400–1650(Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008). The “Other Voice in Early Modern Europe” series from University of Chicago Press has translated most of these works into English for the first time.
7. On Aemilia Lanyer, see Susanne Woods, Lanyer: A Renaissance Woman Poet (Oxford University Press, 1999). A.L. Rowse's “Dark Lady” theory appears inShakespeare's Sonnets (1973). For the feminist reading of Salve Deus, see Barbara Lewalski, “Of God and Good Women,” ELH 54.2 (1987).