In the introduction to this important contribution to the history of women’s reading, S. C. Kaplan describes her book as “bring[ing] together a wealth of granular details so that we might assess the broad cultural patterns they reveal about medieval women readers” (2). I foreground this sentence, with its specific use of the term “granular,” because it so aptly describes Kaplan’s immense undertaking. One of the central challenges of researching late medieval women’s book culture lies in the sheer complexity of the available archival record. Late medieval noblewomen’s access to books and written materials was often mediated, sometimes explicitly, often invisibly, by male librarians, male tutors, and male amanuenses. Noblewomen got married and remarried, sometimes more than once, resulting in the presence of multiple names and titles for a single person within records. Noblewomen’s possessions could revert, up to several times, to near male relatives in women’s youth, their widowhood, or during retreats from public view in the wake of the numerous periods of Western European political turmoil in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Finally, the work of later antiquarians, archivists, and scholars has, until recently, privileged men within the historical record, eclipsing, neglecting or, still more simply, just consolidating women’s records with those of the men in their lives. Kaplan’s work painstakingly unpicks the tangled threads of these archival records, a metaphor I borrow deliberately from the historically women-centered craft of weaving.
Emerging from and complementing her ground-breaking open-access digital humanities project Books of the Duchesses (https://booksofduchesses.com/), co-created by her and Sarah Wilma Watson, Kaplan’s book offers four substantial contributions. Each of these contributions builds into and enriches the other. First, on the most basic level, Kaplan’s work enlarges our understanding of the specific books read by specific women by unearthing a number of previously obscured or neglected records in what amounts to a masterclass in records-combing and synthesis. Of especial importance here is the painstaking work in chapter 1 to reveal records of female book borrowing, rather than just book ownership. By looking beyond ownership, which--given the price and cultural status of aristocratically-owned books in this period--offers only a narrow slice of a woman’s reading predilections, Kaplan’s work enriches our sense of a noblewoman’s intellectual formation and pleasure reading. In modern terms, this might be the difference between knowing what someone displays on their bookshelf in a Zoom call to work colleagues versus what she is checking out of her local library. As Kaplan reminds us, our sense of what women read is fragmented for any number of historical reasons: “Small book collections are not incontrovertible proof of a disinterest in reading, but of limited funds, limited archival evidence, and/or limited material survival...we make a significant error in our assessment of late medieval women as intellectual beings by believing that the documentary evidence concerning their books is a complete reflection of what they read” (52-53). This work also places Kaplan’s attention to the granular on full display, as there are very few actual extant lists of borrowed books (40). To find these records, Kaplan must sift through the margins of book inventories, records of payment for books, and missives asking for the return of borrowed books, as well as collate extant book inventories to trace titles that have vanished from one individual’s list and reappeared in another.
This latter activity of collation between the book records of socially connected individuals points to the second major contribution of this project, already present in chapter 1’s examination of borrowing as well as gift-giving between women, but still more emergent in chapter 2. Kaplan’s work uncovers a vast network of women interconnected by ties of blood, marriage, and political alliance (particularly as instantiated in the medieval practice of fostering children from other families). Much illuminating work has been done on individual noblewomen, particularly figures like Margaret of York, or on the close ties between two or three women at a time. But because the focus has tended to be on single individuals, we have necessarily ended up with a siloed perception of women’s reading culture. Kaplan’s is the first major study to connect multiple prominent historical women together into often dizzying networks of book borrowing, book gifting, and bequeathal (though the latter takes up less of her focus because it is not constitutive of active exchange between two living individuals).
By examining networks of women linked by the movement of their books, Kaplan is able to show startling evidence of women actively shaping and influencing each other’s reading practices, a phenomenon that is, of course, unsurprising if we consider the role of the modern book club, yet one that has not been heretofore fully examined for the late medieval period. Here I was especially struck by the example of Gabrielle de la Tour d’Auvergne, Countess of Montpensier, a lesser noblewoman married into a cadet branch of the Bourbon dukes in 1442. Although belonging to more minor nobility, Gabrielle’s book collection featured copies of texts that had been specifically commissioned by and composed for members of the French royal and Bourbon and Burgundian ducal families, particularly for the women in those families, to whom she was related by marriage. Gabrielle’s choice of books thus suggests a kind of aspirational modeling of her taste on that of the higher-class women in her social ambit (96-97), a phenomenon that made me think of the modern cultural influence of Oprah’s Book Club, in which we similarly see middle-class women follow the reading tastes of a socially prominent female cultural figure.
But Kaplan’s focus on women’s reading networks is especially valuable for recovering women’s reading predilections because her investigation is not only synchronic, but diachronic. In chapter 2, Kaplan also compares book records from three interrelated and overlapping generations of women from the French royal family and the Burgundian and Bourbon ducal families, comprising the ruling élite of Francophone Europe and spanning from 1360 to 1450. Minutely cataloguing similarities and differences across the three generations allows Kaplan to make her third major intervention. It is by now a truism in the field that late medieval women gravitated towards specific genres like devotional literature and romance. But, as Kaplan points out, these are enormous literary categories: what, within these categories, did women actually read, and did that change over time? Looking at the first generation of women, Kaplan shows (nicely toggling between detailed examples and quantitative data arranged in tables) that 50% of the devotional material owned by these women was paraliturgical in nature. By the second generation, devotional book interests shift away from the paraliturgical into expressly theological works. By the third generation, women are reading still less paraliturgical material, far more works of theology and religious history, and have added a new category to their reading: mystery plays. Religious devotional literature, Kaplan demonstrates, while undeniably comprising the bulk of women’s extant book records across the late medieval period is, nevertheless, not a monolithic, but an evolving category. Similarly, while romance remains one of the main genres enjoyed by women across all three generations, the first generation is reading older texts composed between the twelfth and early fourteenth centuries, while the third generation of women leans toward late fifteenth-century texts, exchanging “classics” for the newest titles.
Building off the previous chapters, chapter 3 elucidates Kaplan’s final major contribution to our understanding of late medieval noblewomen’s book culture. Through a concerted case study of the library of the Burgundian ducal family located at their seat in Moulins, Kaplan demonstrates the significant and heretofore unacknowledged shaping influence of female reading tastes onmale book culture. Because there is still so much recovery work to be done, studies of female reading and book collecting have tended to focus on women in isolation, thus giving rise, intentionally or not, to the perception of a female reading sphere as dislocated from a male reading culture. This sense is especially operative, Kaplan suggests, in the very terms by which we tend to describe the library at Moulins and similar contemporary libraries: aducal library, built by and maintained by the dukes of a particular location, who have also received the lion’s share of scholarly attention.
Kaplan redirects our attention onto three prominent women: Marie de Berry, Duchess of Auvergne, daughter of John, Duke of Berry and wife to John I, Duke of Bourbon; Agnes of Burgundy, daughter of John the Fearless and wife to Charles I, Duke of Bourbon, and Joan of France, daughter of King Charles VII and wife of John II, Duke of Bourbon. These women brought books to Moulins as part of their dowries and went on to commission and acquire new texts for the library for the remainder of their lives as active bibliophiles. As Kaplan carefully shows by comparing their acquisitions, these women demonstrate clear intent in enlarging the library’s contents, as when Joan of France acquires a copy of a Christine de Pizan text that is new to the otherwise quite comprehensive array of Pizan texts already present in the library. This acquisition suggests that Joan has identified a gap in the Pizan collection that she is intentionally filling (127). As Kaplan also notes, manuscripts that are listed as jointly owned by a husband and a wife, inscribed by both parties, and illustrated with the likeness or arms of both parties, tend to be treated by scholars as the male party’s sole property. The Bourbon duchesses’ book collecting activities, however, unsettle the basic assumption that a text belonging to a husband and his wife must have been acquired by the husband (100-101). Kaplan reminds us of a basic fact that nevertheless needs to be spelled out: even within the strictures of patriarchy, women (then as now) independently select and purchase items for their households.
Throughout, Kaplan’s valuable arguments are elevated by her deft use of quantitative analysis and impressive capacity to synthesize information. Her extensive footnotes offer a totalizing overview of previous work in the field. Her well laid-out chapters walk the reader with ease through this tangled underbrush of material. For example, chapter 1 is broken down into sections on (1) gift giving between women; (2) gift giving from men to women; (3) borrowing between women; and (4) borrowing by women from men; the other chapters follow similarly neat schematics. As I noted above, Kaplan frequently pivots away from minutely detailed examinations of specific collections into well-placed statistical analyses, arranged into clear tables, for effective bird’s-eye-views that reframe and clarify her dense material. The book further concludes--or, I should say, opens up into--a dazzling set of appendices, equal in total page length to the book itself, consisting of: (1) family trees of the women in question, nicely demonstrating their complex interconnections through blood and marriage; (2) a giant list of texts borrowed and gifted between women and from men to women with indications of contents, genre, individuals involved, and current shelfmark (when applicable); and (3) a brand new inventory of the Bourbon library at Moulins, reflecting Kaplan’s newly uncovered records. These appendices alone are a boon to scholarship on late medieval reading culture and will surely open numerous rabbit holes for future researchers to fall through.
If I have any desire for what this book could have done differently, then it is hardly a critique. Rather, it is an invitation for Kaplan to name openly the methodology that animates this study, for this book is undoubtedly a work ofcritical bibliography, offering an elegant example of how minute, exhaustive (and no doubt exhausting!) archival sleuthing and descriptive bibliography, as paired with quantitative analysis, can yield profound contributions to the sociocultural history of reading in the West. In and through its granularity and its focus on the material object, Kaplan’s monograph makes important inroads into our understanding of how women historically read, accessed, and exchanged books with one another to influence the tastes of other women and of other men. But Kaplan’s book further asks that we reconsider the limits of the fragmentary-seeming archive of female book ownership and book access by teaching us how to unpeel women’s records from the men’s records with which they are both literally and conceptually consolidated. In this detailed focus on the material text that enriches our sense of sociocultural history as it critiques our existing scholarly field and methodologies, Kaplan’s book offers an important medievalist’s take on the kinds of questions raised and challenges posed by recent scholarship on critical bibliography, such as the special edition of Criticism, edited by Kate Ozment and Lisa Maruca, [1] and the recent edited volume American Contact: Objects of Intercultural Encounters and the Boundaries of Book History. [2] This excellent book will therefore certainly speak to the interests of European medievalists, but it also has much to offer methodologically to historians of the book across disciplines.
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Notes:
1. Criticism 64, no. 3/4 (2022).
2. Glenda Goodman, and Rhae-Lynn Barnes, eds. American Contact: Objects of Intercultural Encounters and the Boundaries of Book History (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2024).