Reading Families: Women's Literate Practice in Late Medieval England

Rebecca Krug's analysis of women's literate practices opens up new understanding of ways family relationships shaped women's responses to the challenges of an increasingly text-based society of fifteenth-century England.

Advancing a rich and nuanced account of the way women in the late-medieval England negotiated a culture that paradoxically discouraged their interaction with the written word (p. 4) while also expecting, even requiring, their participation in literate practices, this book makes original contributions to historical, literary, and cultural studies of medieval women's textual activities.

In Reading Families, Krug applies the anthropological concept of practice theory to the subject of women and textual culture in fifteenth century England in order to approximate better the more common, routine interactions women had with written word. In the process, she discovers the advent of female literacy in the collision of two cultural phenomena: the definition of self and world through family connections and the expanding textualization of medieval society.

Krug (Univ. of Minnesota) offers an insightful corrective to earlier studies of medieval women's engagement with texts... Krug makes a significant contribution to the field with this clearly written, meticulously researched book. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.

Krug, unlike Crawford, has a thesis to propound on the subject of 'women's engagement with the written work in late medieval England.' She draws on a body of theory, mainly from social anthropology, to contest the feminist idea that in the middle ages 'women took part in text-based activities as expressions of female insurrection against male-dominated social forces.' Her central argument that women took part in literate culture through membership of families-in the widest sense of social groups-seems eminently sensible.

Not women's literacy, but women's literate practice: Rebecca Krug's new book is sharp and clear and solidly detailed on the range of practical literate activities - writing, reading, dictating, reciting, commissioning, inscribing in memory - that late medieval women engaged in, not in order to assert themselves against the patriarchal order but to show their usefulness and live their lives more fully within the families and religious communities in which they found themselves. Professor Krug gives reality to the imagined experience of women in this world of families and communities, and to their belief in their power to shape that world through the written word.

Reading Families asks new and provocative questions about some of the most pressing issues in late medieval cultural studies. This sharp, well-written book transcends old debates and prejudices with a subtle analysis of the ways English women used texts in their own communities. Scholars interested in literature, history, women, literacy, religion, and the family will find Rebecca Krug's book indispensable.

Rebecca Krug examines diverse women and communities-Margaret Paston, Margaret Beaufort, East Anglian Lollards, and Syon nuns-to develop new ways of thinking about what it meant for women to write and read in fifteenth-century England. Her provocative analysis of the interrelations among power, gender, heresy, and the vernacular makes Reading Families a valuable contribution to cultural and gender studies.

This richly learned and very smart book pursues the implications of late medieval women's literacy through an excitingly productive and original thesis: that medieval women's reading, writing, commissioning, and owning of books and other writings can be best appreciated as centered in community relationships and familial politics-that is, in a social world of immediate or extended notions of 'family' rather than in a notion of an individual producer. The approach is as timely for women's social and literary history as it is for codicology. Indeed, Rebecca Krug shows that this social world can be perceived intimately and in piquant detail only through the books and other writings whose archaeology of meanings she sensitively uncovers and situates.