Beyond Borders: Women Poets in Ireland, Scotland, and Wales up to c. 1500

This essay addresses three fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century women writers who composed erotic and satiric verse: the Welsh poet Gwerful Mechain, and the Scottish Gaelic poets, Iseabal Campbell, Countess of Argyll, and her daughter, Iseabal Ní Mheic Cailéan. Adopting an archipelagic feminist approach, Charnell-White locates these figures within the broader context of late medieval bardic culture in Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, emphasising their high social status and family connections. While the poetry of Gwerful Mechain was highly regarded in her own time and a significant body of her work remains, far fewer poems by Iseabal Campbell and Iseabal Ni Mheic Cailéan survive; like Mechainߣs, however, they were written to be performed before specific audiences. The essay reads the poetry of all three as playfully reappropriating and subverting the formulaic misogynism typical of the male-authored verse in their bardic or coterie groups. In responding to the kind of anti-feminist motifs characteristic of the European tradition of the querelle des femmes, these poets challenge courtly ideals of women as chaste, silent, and obedient and present female sexuality in empowering terms.