Clothed in Language

Pauline Matarasso (1929-2023) was a scholar, translator, and poet with a particular interest in medieval history and literature focused on the Benedictine tradition, though her subjects are wide-ranging and embrace the French prose poet Christian Bobin and the modernist writer Sylvia Townsend Warner. She spent most of her life in rural settings in England and France, much of it on working farms. She was an oblate of Howton Grove Priory, near Hereford. Among other books she has written and edited, she was the translator and editor of The Cistercian World: Monastic Writings of the Twelfth Century (Penguin, 1993) and translator of John of Forde's The Life of Wulfric of Haselbury, Anchorite (CF 79; Cistercian Publications, 2011).