Lara Farina

Women and Reading

One of the most recognized scenes in all of medieval literature is of a woman attacking a book: with a nod and a wink, Chaucer’sWife of Bath proudly recalls how she ripped the pages right out of her husband’scompendium of ‘wicked women’ and survived the beating that followed.1 Yet the antipathy between women and books shown in this portion of the Wife’s monologue belies a much more complex history of female readership in the Middle Ages, one that even the Wife, were she playing straight with her audience, would have to acknowledge. Medieval women readers were generally neither passive recipients of ‘clerkish’ tracts nor resentful book-burning illiterates estranged from textual culture. Rather, women readers were often intimately involved in determining the content and impact of even the most doctrinaire of texts. As patrons of textual production, performers of acts of reading, and agents shaping the reception and distribution of books and other written texts, women readers had a cooperative role in shaping the textual culture of the Middle Ages.

Money, Books, and Prayers: Anchoresses and Exchange in Thirteenth-Century England

For literary scholars, the question of how economic contexts influence literature is not a surprising one, given that we are now routinely familiar with both Marxist and New Historicist approaches to our subject.1 Even so, we do not often ask the question, “How does economic history help us understand devotional literature?” much less the extra-disciplinary yet correlative one, “What does devotional literature have to offer economic history?” To take up this less familiar query (through which we might participate more fully in a cross-disciplinary fashioning of historiography), we need to consider that devotional materials might provide more than just representations that help to date economic changes. Devotional literature, like other kinds of literature, can also provide greater understanding of what economic practices meant to medieval people. After all, even the most scholastic of medieval writers did not discuss “the economy” as a self-contained structure but rather saw trade as imbricated in social and spiritual relations of many kinds. And, as Lianna Farber has recently argued, medieval thinking about the essential conditions of exchange also frequently arrived at “the absence of an external standard and the necessity of inscribing acts of imagination and fiction into the law.”2 Imaginative/fictional representation of social and spiritual relations is of course the subject of literature, so these observations suggest that medieval writing about economic issues could, or even had to, cross into “literary” genres easily. Following its divergent paths into imaginative representations of spiritual selves and communities may prompt us to reconsider what kinds of information economic history should take into account.