Women and their Manuscripts

Abstract

‘Item to Alianore Stratton my doughter 1. ffedirbed and oon transon . and 1 pair fustians and a booke coueryd with red veluet the whiche was my moders […]’. So decreed Alianore Nicholson of East Dereham in mid-Norfolk on the ‘ixth day of Novembyr’, 1487.¹ Thus is encapsulated the rewards and the frustrations of working with last wills and testaments for evidence of women s book ownership, the primary source for such evidence aside from the comparatively rare examples of women s names occurring within extant codices. At one and the same time such references act as signifiers of the manuscript as an object of value and of attachment, and yet we can often remain ignorant of their content, whether secular or religious. In the case of Alianore we might perhaps infer that the book was a personal service book, such as a primer, but of Alianore herself we know no more than that she was a ‘wydowe ; that, in the absence of the naming of any other children, her daughter may have been her sole survivor; and that she was probably a member of the guild of St Withburga in her home town, since she bequeathed it four shillings.²