ABSTRACT
The preceding chapters have focused on how medieval women’s partnerships with scribes are represented in primary sources written during the partners’ lifetimes. This chapter, by contrast, looks at how those same partnerships are represented in secondary sources authored by modern scholars, raising questions about the writing and revising of literary history. As stories of the partnerships get retold over time, what happens to the women and their scribes? How is their collaboration represented by later narrators whose perspectives and purposes differ from those of the medieval writers who first put the partners’ experiences into narrative form? Such questions are relevant to this study for several reasons. At the most basic level, surveying modern scholarship on medieval women’s writing partnerships helps contextualize this study, showing how it both builds on and challenges recent research in the field. More importantly, examining modern accounts of medieval collaboration provides critical insights into medieval accounts themselves. For most modern readers, elements of subjectivity and strategy are easily discernible in twentieth-century scholarly narratives, familiar as we are with how our contemporaries’ cultural, political, racial, sexual, and religious perspectives shape their interpretations of research material. In looking closely at the constructed nature of twentieth-century reports on medieval writing partnerships, modern readers may perceive more clearly the constructed nature of medieval reports on the same. Rather than viewing early narratives as objective sources that become skewed by later generations, then, readers may develop a fuller appreciation for how both primary and secondary sources are carefully constructed narratives that reveal as much about their narrators’ historical perspectives as they do about the subject of medieval women’s writing partnerships.
