Two desiderata in Medieval Studies continue to be rather troublesome because they have not been tackled effectively by many scholars. First, most of us are not familiar with medieval Welsh language and literature; second, we are still rather uncertain about the actual contribution by
women to medieval poetry, for instance. But our Welsh colleagues have already determined for quite some time that the late medieval Gwerful Mechain was a powerful voice and offered many intriguing perspectives as a woman, addressing also sexuality in a rather shockingly open manner. She was
the daughter of Hywel Fychan from Mechain in Powys in north-east Wales. She lived from ca. 1460 to ca. 1502 and was a contemporary of the major Welsh poets Dafydd Llwyd and Llywelyn ap Gutyn. She might have been Dafydd’s lover and she certainly exchanged poems with Llywelyn. Not untypically
for her age, which the present editor and translator Katie Gramich observes with strange surprise, Gwerful combined strongly religious with equally strongly erotic—some would say, pornographic—poetry. Gramich refers, for instance, to the Ambraser Liederbuch, where we can
encounter a similar situation, but it seems unlikely that she has any idea what this songbook was, in reality (there are no further explanations, comments, or references to the relevant scholarship). She also mentions Christine de Pizan, who was allegedly “forced to take up the pen”
(10), which appears to be a wrong assessment altogether. There is no indication whatsoever that Gramich might be familiar with the rich research on late medieval continental and English women writers, but this does not diminish the value of her translation.
Adventures of the spirit: the older woman in the works of Doris Lessing, Margaret Atwood, and other contemporary women writers