Chapter 5 studies the reach of print by looking into modes of acquisition, various owners, and the uses of books in the viceroyalty of Peru. It shows how books permeated late colonial society on a broad scale, figuring as objects in the inventories of petty merchants, artisans, rural clerics, some women, and others who, in previous centuries, had been far less likely to possess books. Focusing on the traces of usage and the material environment, this chapter illustrates book use, which took place indoors as well as outside, solitarily and in groups, and was led by practices different from today’s, characterised above all by intensive reading, particular emotions, and interactions as well as reading aloud. Such an analysis allows a more nuanced assessment of the many protagonists from different backgrounds who participated in the colonial book market and had access to the contents of print publications.

This essay addresses the education of religious women, figured in terms of horizontal and vertical learning, in England at the end of the Middle Ages. It highlights connections between women rather than the more widely discussed relationships between women and their male spiritual advisors. From an examination of the texts obtained by women leaders of the late medieval womenߣs houses, including the English Bridgettine abbey of Syon, it is evident that superiors acquired works relating to the religious rule of life and other devotional texts, and aimed to enable their communities to understand their life and governance. Erler shows that such works were shared via the vertical learning of refectory and other communal readings. Alongside this, more traditional horizontal learning or hierarchical instruction also took place in womenߣs houses: nuns were expected to emulate their elders, and the elders to offer guidance, including in relation to their reading, to which the exchange of books between nuns was central practice. Finally, there is evidence of more formal convent instruction, framed in compassionate and supportive terms.

This essay explores the unique insights into the lives and book ownership of the Paston family offered by its fifteenth-century correspondence. It looks at three Paston women ߝ Agnes Berry Paston, her daughter-in-law Margaret Mautby Paston, and Margaretߣs daughter Elizabeth Paston (Yelverton) ߝ and the books that were in their possession or that they may have read. Putting the evidence concerning book ownership provided by wills, for example, alongside that of letters provides intriguing insights into the spirituality and influence of women, and the value they placed on devotional and moral works. The Paston womenߣs reading also included secular romance, the interest of which may have been as much political as personal. The reading interests of such women, then, extended far beyond the narrowly domestic.

The introduction explores womenߣs authorship and addresses the range of works by or attributed to women that were in circulation in England in the Middle Ages in the context of their contributions to a multilingual and inclusive literary culture. It examines the importance of collaboration, arguing that womenߣs writings may be collaborative in different ways: through amanuenses, through translation and adaptation, and through their historical and literary relationships with the men who write their lives. It explores other collaborative aspects of womenߣs literary culture, including womenߣs contributions as patrons, scribes, readers, and subjects of texts. It considers the importance of womenߣs religious communities, as well as the ways in which devotional books were owned by women and exchanged between nuns and by lay women, and it considers the active engagement of women with secular writing as owners and commissioners of books as well as writers. It argues that English womenߣs networks extend from Britain to the Continent and beyond.

This chapter uses contemporary readers’ marks in anonymous English herbals to argue that Renaissance readers used printed texts as opportunities to record their own experiences of native plants and medical experiments, pushing back against a pervasive view of early herbal readers as credulous and unsophisticated. Printed books like The Grete Herball (1526), the first illustrated printed herbal in England, were the products of publishers who were evaluating the market for particular texts in print and who tested new affordances and marketing strategies on their readers as they published and republished old herbals. Some publishers, like Thomas Gibson, saw in their editions of the herbals an opportunity to endorse medical practitioners’ authority over the body.