Rebecca Krug, Reading Families: Women's Literate Practice in Late Medieval England

Medium Aevum, Fall, 2004 by Sarah Salih

Rebecca Krug, Reading Families: Women's Literate Practice in Late Medieval England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002). ix 238 pp. ISBN 0-80143924-8. 30.50 [pounds sterling].

As the study of medieval women has become mainstream in recent years, a canon of medieval women's writing has emerged. In Reading Families Rebecca Krug resists and contextualizes that canon by defining the more evasive and perhaps more interesting topic of women's 'literate practices'. Writing is of course a literate practice, but one which here takes its place amongst several other forms of engagement with texts, including reading, dictating, patronizing, commissioning, and owning. Krug thus emphasizes the extent to which textual production in a manuscript culture could be reader-generated. Women who could not write could play a part in the production of texts; women who could not read could access them. In the margins of Krug's study (literally, in a couple of lengthy footnotes in the conclusion) is a thoughtful argument against unreflective privileging of the inevitably unrepresentative authorship of medieval women. Two such favoured medieval women writers, Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe, are marginal presences here, but Reading Families is invaluable to any student of these writers as an analysis of the context of female textual engagement which formed them.

Reading Families deals with fifteenth-century middling and elite culture, with a particular interest in East Anglian materials. Reading the letters of Margaret Paston, Krug argues persuasively that female engagement with literacy was neither resistance to nor encroachment on patriarchal privilege. She shows that Margaret's involvement in correspondence was in the interests of her husband and family, and that the letters themselves contribute to her performance of good wifely behaviour. This is a fresh analysis of well-known material, based on close readings of the letters as text. The following chapter examines Margaret Beaufort's correspondence and patronage, tracing her progress from reading and exchanging books in the contexts of household and family to a more public engagement with textuality. In later life Margaret herself translated from French, commissioned translations of numerous devotional works from Latin, and patronized a scholarly community in which, however, she was excluded from full participation by her lack of Latin literacy. Chapters on the reading communities of the Norfolk Lollards and the Bridgettine nuns of Syon Abbey highlight the redefinition of such communities as families. Krug argues that the Lollards tried in Norwich in 1428-31 valued reading and discussion of their reading as a ritual, meditative activity rather than an acquisition of knowledge from texts. Like Margaret Paston, the Lollard women engaged with texts alongside their husbands, in their households. Novices at Syon were expected to bring books with them on entry to the convent, and thereafter their devotional reading was itself an act of imitation of St Bridget and of the Virgin Mary. It was a key element of Syon's public image that its nuns were known to read the latest devotional texts.

Reading Families is enlightening about many aspects of medieval women's literate practice; if its analyses are occasionally speculative, they are always thought-provoking. The only quibble worth mentioning is Krug's overestimation of the strength of the positions she opposes: on several occasions she explicitly counters the claim that medieval women's writing by definition resists patriarchy. Such an analysis would indeed be reductive of the complexity of the material, but surely there are few current critics who would actually make it.

Norwich

SARAH SALIH