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Hello and welcome to the London Review of Books podcast. My name is Thomas Jones. This week I'm

talking to Irina Domitrescu, who teaches medieval English literature at the University of Bonn,

and is the author of the experience of education

in Anglo-Saxon literature, which is out now in paperback. Her piece in the current issue of the

LRB is a review of women writing and religion in England and beyond 650 to 1100 by Diane Watt.

Hello, Irina, and thank you very much for joining me. Hello, it's nice to be here. In the introduction to her book, Diane Watt says that people

often asked her while she was writing and researching it if there were any women writers

in the early Middle Ages. But as her book and your review of it show, that isn't really the right

question, is it, even though one straightforward answer is, well, yes, of course they were. But the idea is a solitary writer.

Well, the thing is our most frequent medieval author, especially when we're looking at

vernacular literature, at Old English, is anonymous wrote the works that we tend to read and

teach in classrooms. So it's a quiet assumption or sometimes

not so quiet assumption that Anonymous was a man. I think that's the instinct that a lot of scholars

and students have. But of course, if we were very, very rigorous about it, we'd have to say that

we'd have to prove that we'd have to prove that anonymous

was a man in any given circumstance. We do know that women in early medieval England had

access to education, had access to Latin literacy, to the classics. Not a lot of them, but also not a lot of the men.

Right. So it is an elite skill to be able to read and write.

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