Rewriting Medieval Japanese Women: Politics, Personality, and Literary Production in the Life of Nun Abutsu April 8, 2013

Literary histories traditionally represent Japanese women’s writing as peaking in the Heian period (794-1185) with works like The Tale of Genji and declining through the Kamakura period (1185-1336) as a result of institutional and cultural transformations. This lecture will discuss how changes in marriage, inheritance, and educational practices impacted the social mobility of medieval noblewomen, while also considering what new sources opportunities for patronage and literary production were available for women both at court and within the household. Following the approach taken in Rewriting Medieval Japanese Women (Hawai‘i, 2013), I will focus on one woman, Nun Abutsu (1225-1285), and consider what her tumultuous life and many works reveal about the possibilities for women’s writing in medieval Japan.