Written out

In his essay on The Owl and the Nightingale, Nick Spencer locates Simon Armitage in a tradition of writers reworking medieval poetry made up of Seamus Heaney, Bernard O’Donoghue and Matthew Francis (“Medieval twittering,” December).

Armitage has tremendous artistic skill. But this list ignores the innovative contributions of poets and authors such as Patience Agbabi, whose collection Telling Tales, a 21st-century remix of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, was shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Prize in 2015, and Zadie Smith, whose reworking of the Wife of Bath as the Wife of Willesden was recently performed at the Kiln Theatre in London. Arguably, both writers do as much as Heaney et al to “bring medieval poetry to contemporary audiences” (as Spencer puts it).

Even if the earliest centuries of English literary culture were dominated by white men, there’s no justification for ignoring the work of women of colour today. Diane Watt, author of “Women, Writing and Religion in England and Beyond, 650-1100”