Women and Reading

Abstract

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.