Professor Diane Watt

Diane Watt is Professor of Medieval English Literature and Co-Director of SGS (the Sex,
Gender and Sexualities Research Centre) at the University of Surrey. Her main research and
teaching interests are in the areas of medieval literature, women's writing, and gender and
sexuality. With Liz Herbert McAvoy and Michelle M. Sauer, she is joint Editor-in-Chief of The
Palgrave Encyclopedia of Medieval Women's Writing in the Global Middle Ages. With
Corinne Saunders, she recently co-edited a volume entitled Women and Medieval Literary
Culture from the Early Middle Ages to the Fifteenth Century, which was published in 2023 by
Cambridge University Press. She has published several books and edited collections about
medieval women’s writing and gender and sexuality, including Secretaries of God
(Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1997), Amoral Gower (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
2003), Medieval Women’s Writing (Cambridge: Polity, 2007) and Women, Writing and
Religion in England and Beyond, 650-1100 (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019). In 2004
she published an edition of the selected letters of the Paston women (Cambridge: D.S.
Brewer).

While at the OCLW, she will be completing a biography of Margaret Paston, entitled God’s
Own Gentlewoman, which will be published by Icon Books. This project uses the letters
Margaret Paston as a starting point to explore women’s lived experience in fifteenth-
century Norfolk. It focuses on around twenty letters written by Margaret across her lifetime,
from the years immediately following her marriage to those leading up to her death. The
events described in these letters become the starting point for a micro-biography—looking
in detail at Margaret’s life at that moment--and for a broader exploration of social and
cultural history. By privileging Margaret's letters and life, she aims to offer new perspectives
on the Paston's familial and social networks, e.g. by highlighting women's friendships. But
the project will include accounts and anecdotes of her travels around contemporary
Norfolk, in search of the sites described in Margaret’s letters, and her reflections on what
has drawn me back to the Paston letters, and to Margaret Paston’s correspondence. This
project tries to push at the limits of women's history, biography, and life-writing, by
considering the possibilities offered by speculation and imaginative reconstruction, offering
a timely intervention in both life writing and literary studies by crossing the borders
between biography and history, creative and critical, and the academic and the personal.