The Works of Gwerful Mechain: A Broadview Anthology of British Literature Edition

Product Description

All of Gwerful Mechain’s known work is included here―as are several poems of uncertain authorship, and a selection of other works that help to fill in the historical and literary context.
Each medieval Welsh poem is provided in the original language and in two different translations―a literal translation and a second, freer translation, with rhyme patterns approximating those of the original.

Review

“Gwerful Mechain is the boldest, most accomplished and most combative female poet of medieval Wales.
“This important edition by Professor Katie Gramich, which includes lively translations into English, finally lifts the double veil of prudery and patriarchy from Gwerful’s work, bringing her extraordinary voice to the attention of a wider audience. Gwerful’s lust for life and her candid eroticism, her mastery of poetic form, and her spirited defiance of some of the most deeply held prejudices of her day, make her work as relevant today as it was 500 years ago.” ― Angharad Price, Bangor University
“One of the boldest female voices of medieval European literature is made accessible here for the first time to the non-Welsh speaking reader. Skilled in the complexities of the Welsh poetic art, Gwerful Mechain defied the conventions of the male-dominated bardic order to produce witty and passionately personal poems. Her vibrant voice comes across strongly in these translations, which use both prose and verse to convey the sense and tone of the Welsh originals. Professor Gramich’s scholarly introduction and notes place the poetry in its Welsh and European cultural contexts, and at last Gwerful can take her rightful place in the history of women’s writing.” ― Professor Dafydd Johnston, Director of the University of Wales Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies, Aberystwyth
“The learned, delightful and often pleasingly eccentric poetry of the ‘elusive’ medieval Welsh woman writer, Gwerful Mechain, has remained largely unknown―and thus unappreciated―beyond circles of Welsh language scholarship operating since the nineteenth century. This has remained the case in spite of Gwerful’s clear renown and importance within Welsh poetic circles during her own day. As such, the proto-feminist stances of the poet, her celebratory poetics of a sexually-active female body more often deemed abject in other socio-religious contexts, and the moving affect of her lyrically pious devotional works have failed to be accounted for in most contemporary histories of women’s writing. This lamentable position is now all set to change upon the publication of Katie Gramich’s captivating scholarly edition of Gwerful’s writings. With its erudite and accessible introduction, carefully expounded apparatus, and the offering of double translation―both poetic and literal―this edition offers much-to-be-welcomed accessibility to Gwerful’s poetry for far more global audiences, especially those with little or no expertise in the Welsh language. Gramich not only provides valuable new insight into the importance―and centrality―of Gwerful’s writing in her own day; she also demonstrates its importance in more contemporary contexts, opening a dialogue between Gwerful’s work and the type of feminist poetics to which the history of women’s writing has become so indebted in recent decades.” ― Professor Liz Herbert McAvoy, Swansea University
“Gwerful Mechain (c. 1460–c. 1502), is one of the most notorious yet least known of early Welsh poets. A woman who wrote of women’s experience as well as other topics, her works were not collected in a scholarly edition until 2001: scholars of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries considered them too boldly erotic and explicit. Prominent Welsh critic and scholar Dr. Katie Gramich has in this volume translated all poems authored or likely authored by Gwerful Mechain, along with poems by her contemporaries that provide context. In doing so, she reveals for readers ‘a celebratory poet in the widest sense of tha