10 - English Women and Their French Books: Teaching about the Jews in Medieval England

Summary

Among the nearly 1,000 items in French that survive from medieval England's four hundred years of francophone culture, as listed in Dean and Boulton's indispensable Anglo-Norman Literature, are numerous manuscripts commissioned by aristocratic English women for whom French had become a language of culture and learning. Such women, some of whom may well have controlled budgets of their own, benefitted from the increasing wealth of the English aristocracy and the availability of a shared, privileged vernacular language. They bore responsibility for the moral and religious education of their children and of other family and household members, and they had the means to commission devotional and biblical material. Often, such women could personalize their religious reading by participating in the decision process, consulting with their clerics, scribes and illustrators about a book's contents, order of selections and the kinds and numbers of illustrations, perhaps with the intention of making them suitable for the instruction of a range of adults and children. As the patrons of frequently luxurious and expensively produced books, women helped to advance the well-documented ‘laicization’ of religious literature in medieval England, in large part the result of an environment notable for the very close and porous links between the high-ranking laity and the clergy (so much so that, as Sara Lipton observes studying the Bible moralisee, divisions between lay and clerical become ‘inadequate categories of investigation’). Modern scholars, prominent among them Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, have done a great deal to locate, describe and interpret English women's intellectual contributions, especially to manuscript culture. That work, along with Wogan-Browne's extensive investigations into England's long French-language moment, have altered our conceptual map of medieval England's literary practices.

In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries especially, the Church wished to strengthen and define itself anew and to reach out more broadly to laypeople (as codified, for example, in various canons of the Fourth Lateran Council, 1215). In the same period, enmity toward the Jews also increased, reaching a zenith (but not an end) in the 1290 Expulsion. Why this was so, and why the period beginning in the twelfth century in particular provided the soil upon which anti-Jewish feeling grew, has been the subject of numerous studies.