Medieval Women Poets in Translation

Christine de Pizan presents her book to Isabeau of Bavaria, Queen of France. Detail from the dedicatory image in the Queen’s Manuscript (London, British Library, Harley 4431, fol. 3r).

This list of medieval women’s poetry in English translation is organized chronologically by language and alphabetically by translator. (Scroll down for a note on what I mean by “medieval,” “women,” and “poetry.”) Additions are welcome. Happy #WITMonth, everyone!

African languages, oral tradition

North American langages, oral tradition

Polynesian languages, oral tradition

Classical Arabic, 5th–16th centuries

Latin, 5th–16th centuries

Persian, 5th–16th centuries

Classical Chinese, 7th–16th centuries

Armenian, 8th century

  • Diana Der-Hovanessian, tr. The Other Voice: Armenian Women’s Poetry Through the Ages. Edited with Maro Dalley. Watertown, MA: Armenian International Women’s Association Press, 2005. [Includes translations of traditional folk chants, lullabies, fortune-telling verses, curses, and spells (pages 1–14), as well as the eighth-century poets Khosrovidoukht Koghtnatsi and Sahakdoukht Siunetsi.]

Classical Japanese, 8th–12th centuries

Old Irish, 9th century

  • Augusta, Lady Gregory, tr. The Kiltartan Poetry Book: Prose Translations from the Irish. New York: Knickerbocker Press, 1919. [Includes a translation from a medieval poem spoken in the voice of the legendary Hag of Beara, or An Chailleach Bhéara, which might have been written by a ninth-century nun named Digde. See also Máirín Ní Dhonnchadna, “Women in the Medieval Poetry Business,” in A History of Irish Women’s Poetry, ed. Ailbhe Darcy and David Wheatley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 40–56.]
  • Eleanor Hull, tr. “Legends and Traditions of the Cailleach Bheara or the Old Woman (Hag) of Beare.” Folklore 38, no. 3 (September 30, 1927): 225–254.
  • Maurice Riordan, ed. The Finest Music: An Anthology of Early Irish Lyrics. London: Faber & Faber, 2017. [Includes Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin’s translation of the “Song of the Woman of Beare” on pages 44–49.]

Sanskrit, 9th–12th centuries

Old Norse, 9th–13th centuries

Byzantine Greek, 9th–16th centuries

Hebrew, 10th–16th centuries

Middle High German, 11th–15th centuries

Vietnamese, 11th–16th centuries

  • Sanh Thông Huỳnh, tr. An Anthology of Vietnamese Poems: From the Eleventh through the Twentieth Centuries. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996. [Includes sixteen anonymous poems.]
  • Ngọc Bích Nguyễn, tr. A Thousand Years of Vietnamese Poetry. New York: Knopf, 1975. [Part Two is devoted to anonymous poems from the popular tradition.]
  • [There is a Wikipedia entry for Nguyễn Thị Duệ (1574–1654; courtesy name Ngọc Toàn, pen names Diệu Huyền and Đào Hoa Am), the Imperial consort and scholar who has been called the first female doctor of Việt Nam. I have not yet managed to locate translations of her poetry …]

Kannada, 12th century

  • Vinaya Chaitanya, tr. Songs for Siva: Vacanas of Akka Mahadevi. HarperCollins India.
  • A. K. Ramanujan, tr. Speaking of Siva. Penguin, 1973. [Translations of the vachanas of Akka Mahadevi.]
  • [Vanamala Vishwanatha’s translations of Akka Mahadevi are in preparation.]

Tamil, 12th century

Old Occitan (Provençal), 12th–13th centuries

Old French, 12th–13th centuries

Dutch, 13th century

Middle Low German, 13th century

Italian, 13th century

  • Fabian Alfie, tr. “La Compiuta Donzella of Firenze (ca.1260): The Complete Poetry.” Medieval Feminist Forum 10 (2019): 3–42.
  • Samantha Pious, tr. “La Compiuta Donzella: Three Sonnets.” ed. Gianfranco Contini. Doublespeak Magaine (Fall 2016). [Scroll down for the Table of Contents.]
  • Samantha Pious, ed. & tr. “I Loved a Sparrowhawk.” Volume 3 (December 15, 2020). [Francesco Trucchi, who edited this poem in the nineteenth century, imagined that it might have been composed by La Nina Siciliana, who, according to sixteenth- and seventeenth-century legends, had been the lover of thirteenth-century poet Dante da Maiano. Unfortunately, La Nina Siciliana is probably just that––a legend.]
  • Luciano Rebay, ed. & tr. Introduction to Italian Poetry: A Dual-Language Book. New York: Dover, 1971. [Includes translations of La Compiuta Donzella.]

Catalan, 14th century

  • Kathleen McNerney, tr. “La Reyna de Mallorques.” Catalan Review 5.2 (1991): 163-167.
  • [My new translation of Lady Tecla’s verse exchange with Ausiàs March is now seeking a home!]

Kashmiri, 14th century

Middle French, 14th–15th centuries

Old Yiddish, 14th–15th centuries

Nahuatl, 15th century

  • Miguel León-Portilla, ed. & tr. Fifteen Poets of the Aztec World. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992. [Includes translations of Macuilxochitzin, or Macuilxochitl (b. ca. 1435), an Aztec noblewoman.]

Classic Scottish Gaelic, 15th century

  • Meg Bateman, tr. An Anthology of Scottish Women Poets. Edited by Catherine Kerrigan. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1991. [Includes translations of anonymous folksongs and ballads, as well as Aithbhreac Inghean Corcadail (fl. 1460) and Iseabail Ni Mheic Cailéin (fl. 1500).

Old Spanish, 15th century

Old Portuguese, 15th century

Hindi, 15th–16th centuries

Ottoman Turkish, 15th–16th centuries

  • Walter G. Andrews, Najaat Black, and Mehmet Kalpakli, ed. & tr. Ottoman Lyric Poetry: An Anthology. University of Washington Press, 2006. [Includes translations of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century poets Mihri Hatun and Zeynep Hatun.]

Middle Welsh, 15th–16th centuries

A Few Tentative Definitions

“Medieval,” “women,” and “poetry” are hotly contested terms. When did the Middle Ages begin, and when did they end? How should they be subdivided? Is it accurate to call them a single historical period? Did they exist at all? If a woman is not necessarily an “adult human female” (as political conservatives and even some feminists put it), then what is she? If the category of woman includes trans women, cis women, and any nonbinary people who feel comfortable in women’s spaces, is womanhood an identity, a community, or a bit of both? If women’s experiences differ drastically according to race, ethnicity, religion, culture, class, profession, nationality, dis/ability, sexual orientation, assigned sex, and so on, do we really constitute a single group? If poetry runs the gamut from song to silent reading, lyric to epic, rhymed and metered verse to blank verse to free verse to prose, is it ultimately undefinable?

For the purpose of this list, I have used the word “medieval” in a Eurocentric sense, from the fall of Rome to the spread of the printing press. Of course, this periodization, which varies among the different regions of Europe, does not map well onto other cultures and civilizations––especially those whose earliest poems belong to an oral tradition and have only recently been put into writing. A “woman” identifies herself as such, whether in her name, the grammatical gender she uses to refer to herself, or the terms she uses to describe herself. She is not a cis man writing under a woman’s name or in a female persona (though perhaps some of the ostensibly cis men who did so were actually closeted trans women or nonbinary people). Anonymous is often a woman. “Poetry” is whatever a given cultural or literary tradition says it is. In the western European Romance languages, poems were virtually always rhymed and metered; in Latin, poems were generally metered but not rhymed until perhaps the tenth or eleventh century.

These definitions have allowed me to cover a long historical period––over one thousand years––with as wide a geographical spread as possible. In scholarship and in popular culture, there is a tendency to cherry-pick women poets––to start with Enheduanna or Sappho, skip to Hildegard of Bingen, Christine de Pizan, and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, hurry through Anne Bradstreet and Phillis Wheatley Peters, pause at Emily Dickinson, and burst into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, which somehow always seem to be represented as completely modernist and postmodernist, full of free verse and experimental poetry, as though that were the direction literary history was headed in all along. This tendency seems to be based in the assumption that the Middle Ages were so “primitive,” so “dark”––as the now-proverbial saying goes, “a world lit only by candlelight”––that even if any medieval poems written by women did survive, they would not be worth reading seriously. But they did, and they are. It’s worth remembering that the Middle Ages are not dark in and of themselves; rather, it is we who see them “through a glass darkly.” The great hope of medieval studies––fly, Icarus, fly!––is to know them even as they knew themselves.

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