From the Back Cover
"
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."--C. David Benson, University of Connecticut
"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."--Andrew Galloway, Cornell University
"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."--Karen A. Winstead, Ohio State University
"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."--Derek Pearsall, Harvard University
--This text refers to the
Paperback
edition.
About the Author
Rebecca Krug is Associate Professor of English at the University of Minnesota.
--This text refers to the
Paperback
edition.
