‘Women talking about the things of God’: a late medieval sub-culture

The Pepys Apocalypse (Cambridge, Magdalene College, MS Pepys 1803) and the readership of religious women

“…80 Hamburger, The Rothschild Canticles, 58. their books on to other women in their families. 85 What little evidence we have of ownership of other metrical Apocalypses suggests they also appealed to members of the laity. By the mid-1330s an illustrated version of the metrical Apocalypse, the lavish Corpus Christi Apocalypse, was owned by Sir Henry Cobham.…”

Historians on Chaucer

“…32 A substantial re-evaluation of the intellectual and spiritual character of religious women's lives drawing on the evidence of book ownership and circulation demonstrates that many nuns engaged actively both with their profession, and with contemporary devotional trends, such as affective piety with its emphasis on the suffering of Christ, which were also of great interest to contemporary lay women readers. 33 Modern critics who identify the Prioress as emotionally unfulfilled are arguably complicit with the invective of estates satire by failing to acknowledge the potential for relative selfdetermination and self-expression which a professional religious life could offer to medieval women. 34 These changing interpretations of the nature and quality of female religious life in latemedieval England have informed some readings of the Prioress which focus on the dissonances between Chaucer's depiction of her and what we know of real nuns.…”

The Later Medieval English Urban Household

“…151 The circulation of texts between lay and religious houses, as Felicity Riddy suggests, created a textual community in which the female readers shared a distinctive female "subculture" which contrasted with that of the clerics. 152 Primers and books of Hours are thought to have constituted the majority of books that would have been shared and passed around the medieval household. It has been suggested that adult female readers, especially mothers, might have used these books as educational tools for children.…”