Reading Women in Late Medieval England

This dissertation examines and identifies the ways in which devotional activities became feminized textual practices in the later Middle Ages. Tracing the vicissitudes of elite women's involvement in the production and dissemination of a series of devotional texts, Reading Women in Late Medieval England offers a new critical lens through which to better understand women's involvement in the literary culture of the late Middle Ages by focusing on the historical figure of the aristocratic laywoman reader. It pursues her influence across a generic range of devotional material in English and French, from female hagiography to didactic prose to prayer, including translations undertaken by women. The texts under consideration here, ranging in date from the mid-fifteenth to the early sixteenth centuries, represent the most popular books in medieval libraries and arose in a context of growing vernacular literacy and a movement toward affective forms of piety. Drawing on a number of fifteenth-century sources, including wills, household accounts and library inventories, the project recognizes the fundamental and specific engagement of women with some of the most important developments in vernacular literature, late medieval spirituality and book culture.

Falling easily into two sections, the first two chapters of this study focus on manuscripts commissioned for or by women readers and examine the ways in which the presence of specific women readers enters into the text. The second two chapters shift the focus to early printed books and take up the issues surrounding the presence of the woman reader as patron and the development of her cachet with respect to devotional literature made available to a broad and diverse audience. Reading women back into the leaves of the books they read, owned and commissioned, I investigate their presence via two prevalent metaphors: that of speaking and that of seeing. The voice and visibility of the elite woman reader, available in rare and rarely read texts, allows me to reconsider and refigure late medieval devotional literature not as a genre fashioned for women, but as a genre fashioned by women.