Apologies to Women

Professor Mann, first woman holder of the prestigious Chair of Medieval and Renaissance English at Cambridge, takes as the subject of her inaugural lecture the curiously frequent apologies made by male writers of the Middle Ages to the women in their audience. She shows how such apologies, whether for sexually explicit language, or for misogynistic outbursts, form a literary tradition in their own right, animated by interests and impulses that for the most part have little to do with a concern for real-life women. Her spirited lecture ranges over such writers as Boccaccio, Jean de Meun, Chaucer, Machaut and Lydgate, and concludes that of all these male authors only Chaucer has an idea of what a real apology to women would look like.