Women and the Book: Assessing the Visual Evidence (review)

Women and the Book: Assessing the Visual Evidence. Edited by Lesley Smith and Jane H. M. Taylor. London: British Library and Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997. 287 pp. $75.00 (cloth); $29.95 (paper). ISBN 0-8020-8069-3.

This splendid collection of fourteen essays, which grew out of the 1993 conference on Women and the Book at St. Hilda's, Oxford, is well edited, beautifully printed on heavy paper, and generously illustrated with 112 plates, nine of which are in color. The volume is the third in the "Women and the Book" series.

The essays are grouped according to the topics "Images of Women," "Images and Books by Women," and "Images and Books for Women." The first group opens with "Scriba Femina: Medieval Depictions of Women Writing" by Lesley Smith, who reports the not surprisingly sparse results of her search for women shown writing. In addition to a few legendary figures in Boccaccio's De claris mulieribus, only four real-life medieval women are regularly represented as writing: Marie de France, Hildegard of Bingen, St. Bridget of Sweden, and Christine de Pizan.

The next three contributions involve the interpretation of medieval images. Sandra Hindman demonstrates how the opening and closing miniatures in two Paris manuscripts of Marie de France's Fables (BnF fr. 2173 and Arsenal 3142) function as glosses that enhance Marie's authorial status. Wendy Armstead's "Interpreting Images of Women with Books in Misericords" invokes Bakhtin's theory of the carnival to support the contention that apparently positive representations of women on misericords must be read parodically. Martha Driver offers general guidelines for interpreting images of medieval women and recommends testing out a variety of lenses--realistic, ironic, and allegorical--and fleshing out context as fully as possible.

The second group of essays opens with Thérèse McGuire's introduction to the literary accomplishments of those two incomparable twelfth-century abbesses, Herrad of Landsberg and Hildegard of Bingen. Judith Oliver offers a penetrating comparison of three German Gothic manuscripts that were decorated or redecorated by nuns and medieval embroidered cloth from Saxon convents. Oliver links their common aesthetic with the devotional practice of lectio divina. Marie-Luise Ehrenschwendtner summarizes her research on one of the most important convent libraries from the fifteenth century, the Dominican St. Catherine's in Nuremberg, to which some five hundred to six hundred books and thirty-two distinct copyists can be connected. Kate Lowe studies the Benedictine Convent of Le Murate in Florence, where Suora Battista Carducci copied in 1509 a missal that was lavishly illustrated by Attavante Attavanti and presented to Pope Leo X in 1515. Suora Carducci's missal (Paris, BnF lat. 17323) is the only surviving manuscript that has been definitely traced to Le Murate's large scriptorium.

The third section opens with Richard Gameson's essay on the gospel lectionary of Margaret of Scotland, currently housed in the Bodleian Library in Oxford. Fascinating insights into Margaret's devotional reading practices are deduced by Gameson from his analysis of the content and layout of the manuscript. Anne Rudloff Stanton's "From Eve to Bathsheba and Beyond: Motherhood in the Queen Mary Psalter" examines the iconography of the some eight hundred miniatures in London, B. L. Royal 2.B.VII, an early-fourteenth-century codex presented to Mary Tudor in 1553. The prominence of images of women leads to Stanton's hypothesis that the manuscript was initially intended for a female patron, quite possibly Isabella, wife of Edward II. Susan L. Ward's study of Paris, Arsenal 3142 provides a complement to Sandra Hindman's essay in that it demonstrates how the manuscript's miniatures, in addition to emphasizing Marie de France as author of the Fables, highlight as well Marie de Brabant, second wife of Philip III, in her roles as reader and patroness. Flora Lewis shows how the supposedly feminine image of the eroticized wound and the image of the arma Christi in seven manuscripts...