Sociable Objects: Women Reading 1500-1900

What did books mean to women in the medieval to Enlightenment period – and how did they use them? Matt Clancy tells us about the fourteenth-century aristocrat Katherine Neville and her Book of Hours; Eva Lauenstein uses Mildred Cooke’s reading to examine the Reformation uses of books to influence not just religion but politics, and Lou Horton brings to light the extraordinary story of how Mary’s White’s reading shaped her famous brother Gilbert’s Natural History of Selbourne.


Matt Clancy (PhD Birkbeck, 2020),‘Katherine Neville and the Hastings Hours’
Matt Clancy shows how Katherine Neville, Baroness Hastings (1442-1504) was at the heart of the conflict we now know as the Wars of the Roses. Katherine and her husband, William, Baron Hastings, were close allies of King Edward IV of York, an association which led to Hastings’ death in 1483, when Richard III claimed the throne. Remarkably, however, Katherine survived and thrived. Her Book of Hours, known as the Hastings Hours, is now part of the British Library collection and gives a clear sense of Katherine’s place in events at the heart of the Yorkist faction. Please cite using Matt Clancy, ‘Katherine Neville and the Hastings Hours’ in Matt Clancy, Lou Horton and Eva Lauenstein, ‘Sociable Objects’ podcast, Birkbeck Arts Weeks 2020 online / 15 June 2020.
Eva Lauenstein (PhD ,Birkbeck, 2020), ‘Mildred Cecil, the Tomb and the Writing of Protestant Piety’
In Elizabethan England, your devotional reading was never entirely an inward-facing pastime, but always a highly politicised pious performance. When the scholar and translator Mildred Cooke Cecil (1526–1589) was buried in Westminster Abbey, her epitaph reminded readers that she ‘spent all her life in the study of sacred literature and the letters of holy men, especially the Greeks such as Basil the Great, Chrysostom, Gregory of Nazianzus and similar others’. On her monument, Mildred’s library is opened to the viewing and reading public for scrutiny in a way that openly challenges ideas about reading as a private pastime. It suggest that the performance of female reading played an important role in the emergence of English Protestantism and its books. Please cite using Eva Lauenstein, ‘Mildred Cecil, the Tomb and the Writing of Protestant Piety’ in Matt Clancy, Lou Horton and Eva Lauenstein, ‘Sociable Objects’ podcast, Birkbeck Arts Weeks 2020 online / 15 June 2020.
Lou Horton (doctoral student at Birkbeck), ‘Sister Antiquary: How Molly White Read Medieval Poetry in Georgian London’
Born in 1759, Molly White was active in the London book trade in the last decades of the eighteenth century. This podcast delves into her private correspondence to listen to her discussing Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Milton, as well as the classics, with family members. Through her own words, we recreate her bookcase shelving medieval poetry alongside eighteenth century collections of ballads and manuscripts to understand why her uncle – the natural historian – Gilbert White, declared her to be ‘sister antiquary’. This is part of work in progress. Please cite using Lou Horton, ‘Sister Antiquary: How Molly White Read Medieval Poetry in Georgian London’ in Matt Clancy, Lou Horton and Eva Lauenstein, ‘Sociable Objects’ podcast, Birkbeck Arts Weeks 2020 online / 15 June 2020.