Women and the Book: : Assessing the Visual Evidence

Citation

Malcolm Watson, W. (1998), "Women and the Book: : Assessing the Visual Evidence", Library Review, Vol. 47 No. 8, pp. 404-405. https://doi.org/10.1108/lr.1998.47.8.404.4

This work is one of a new series of monographs and collected essays entitled The British Library Studies in Medieval Culture. The series takes “manuscript studies as a focus for research in all aspects of medieval culture”. As will be noted from the title of this volume, pictorial evidence is used by the contributors to examine a wide variety of aspects of women and the book, including depictions of women writing, women using books, women as owners and women as collectors. While much has been written on the understanding/interpretation of textual images, comparatively little has appeared on the reliability/ validity of the visual image as a provider of information for the historical researcher. It is also relevant to note that much documentation on women’s history has been lost, and consequently picture evidence is particularly important. The papers illustrate how visual images can be understood and explained and to what extent they can be relied on. It is shown that the image can never be a “simple record” of an artist’s world and that the images are similar to the sentences and paragraphs of text, in that they need to be read in context. The contributors make clear that it is important to know who made the image, for whom and for what reason. To obtain effective analysis the visual evidence is shown to have to be used along with the accompanying text and with, for example, established contemporary economic, political or theological knowledge.

The papers in this work consist in part of those read at St. Hilda’s Conference on Women and the Book in the Middle Ages, Oxford, 1993, and in part of papers independently commissioned. The Conference illustrated the amount of interest which has developed in the topic of literate women and medieval imagery and the lack of hard evidence available on which to make generalisations and valid statements. The questions raised and attempts to solve them present an essential core of material for any student or scholar with an interest in a wide range of subjects apart from women’s studies and manuscript production; for instance the art historian, the cultural historian, the bibliographer, the library historian and the antiquarian bookseller should all find valuable food for thought and extension of knowledge here. The book, while breaking new ground, recognises that there is a great deal more digging to be done before the seeds which are being sown can develop into an established crop of acceptable “prize vegetables” of knowledge.

Readers will find investigations into, for example, why women rarely appear as scribes in representations of writing; distinction between women writing and women reading; interpretation of images of women with books in misericords ‐ only recently developed but already an important contribution to various aspects of medieval social history; information on women’s daily lives, for example home, living conditions, dress, books read by women and women’s relationships with Books of Hours.

The library historian will see evidence of a convent library of the fifteenth century indicating privately owned books and books owned by the convent (a topic hitherto rarely investigated and recorded), what nuns read and how they contributed to the development of other libraries through the copying of texts. There is still much to be discovered in this area and as in most research there is a lighter side to the work: it is stated that “The relationship between nuns and male illuminators has yet to be explored in detail” ‐ we await someone throwing some light on this topic!

This is a stimulating publication and should be available in relevant academic and special libraries, though because of the wide ranging implications of its content, it should also find a place in larger public libraries where it is likely to attract a number of interested readers. Although the book is well presented with relevant and clear coloured and black and white illustrations, and the 14 contributions are well endowed with bibliographical references, and are accompanied by a useful list of manuscript sources arranged alphabetically by geographical location of the manuscripts, there are one or two unfortunate errors. An erratum slip has had to be provided since Figure 77 shows the wrong illustration and there appears to be some confusion over the date of publication ‐ 1996 on the title page but 1997 appears on the verso.