The Welsh poet Gwerful Mechain was active in the late fifteenth century and the beginning of the sixteenth, and she is the only Welshwoman from the Middle Ages to have left a significant number of poems. Few details of her life are recorded, and her poems, composed and transmitted orally at first, as was the Welsh tradition, appear not to have been written down during her lifetime. As a married woman and a mother, unable to follow the Welsh poet’s usual peripatetic career, she left no praise poetry, the mainstay of the masculine tradition of the period. Instead, her work provides a rare example of a female voice addressing women’s gender-specific experiences, including domestic violence and rape, and she fearlessly defends those wronged by men. To what extent she speaks of personal experience, however, or whether she is presenting a carefully crafted persona, cannot always be established. Her celebration of active female sexuality caused her for much of the twentieth century to be written off purely as a writer of smut, and no full edition of her poems was published until 2001. Nonetheless, she also left poems on other themes, notably nature, and Christian devotion. Strikingly, Gwerful stands out for her detailed knowledge of medieval Welsh law, especially the law relating to women.