Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy Department at Kings College London and the LMU in Munich, online at historyofphilosophy.net.

Today's episode, she uttereth piercing eloquence, women's spiritual literature. Virginia Woolf's famous essay, A Room of One's Own, imagines what would have happened if Shakespeare had had a sister with gifts similar to his own.

Her literary curiosity would have been gently but firmly blocked by her parents. As Woolf imagines, she picked up a book now and then one of her brothers perhaps and read a few pages, but then her parents came in and told her to mend the stockings or mine this stew and not moon about with books and papers.

The demands of married life would further have stymied her development in adulthood, as for getting involved in the London data scene like her brother did, that would have been unthinkable.

Shakespeare's non-existent sister would ultimately, like Woolf herself, have committed suicide for who shall measure the heat and violence of the poet's heart when caught and tangled in a woman's body.

Woolf's disturbing conclusion is that in general, any woman born with a great gift in the 16th century would certainly have gone crazed, shot herself, or ended her days in some lonely cottage outside the village, half witch, half wizard, feared and mocked at.

This fictional narrative is intended to explain what Woolf assumed as an obvious fact, certainly no woman wrote a word of that extraordinary Elizabethan literature when every other man it seemed was capable of song or song it.

It's a tremendously powerful piece of writing, even though this starting assumption is at most only half-right. Surely it's true that in Elizabethan society, the plays of Shakespeare could not have been written by a woman.

Woolf was interested above all in the expression of literary genius, and there's no doubting the obstacles that have stood in the way of such expression long before and long after the 16th century.

In this period, women were quite literally told to keep their mouths shut.

Shakespeare himself alluded to this in a line from two gentlemen of Verona, to be slow in words is a woman's only virtue.

This looks like satire, but the same point was sometimes made with strident seriousness as in a work on rhetoric by Thomas Wilson, what becomeeth a woman best and first of all, silence, what second, silence, what third, silence, what fourth, silence, yay if a mangd asked me till doomsday I was still cry, silence, silence.

Yet Woolf was wrong to think that women made no contribution to Elizabethan literature. Perhaps they produced no works of genius, but they did publish poems, including sonnets, as well as translations and religious writings.

In fact, one could argue that the 16th century was a turning point in the history of women's writing in England.

It was a time when new opportunities opened up for such writing thanks to the emergence of humanism and the Reformation.

That would be clearer to us if we start by discussing a figure who was active somewhat earlier, in the first half of the 15th century, Marjorie Kemp, who was born in about 1373 and died in 1449.

If we compare her to other women we've covered here on the podcast, we have to say that Kemp shares very little with her near contemporary, Christine Dipizan, and is far more reminiscent of medieval mystics like Julian of Norwich.

In fact, Kemp got to meet Julian when this famous anchorite was an old woman.

Like Julian, her thought was premised upon and licensed by experiences of a personal encounter with God.

So if we are going to be in the difficult business of drawing a line between late medieval and Renaissance writing by women, we would probably want to put Kemp on the medieval side of that line.

But if we want to speak of her as having produced writing at all, then this should come with some caveats.

The work known simply as the book of Marjorie Kemp was dictated by her to a male companion, and then copied out with extensive improvements to the language by a friendly priest.

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