Committee:

Anthony Grafton, co-adviser
Sara S. Poor, co-adviser
Jennifer Rampling
Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski, University of Pittsburgh
Melissa B. Reynolds, Texas Christian University

Abstract:

My dissertation is a history of laywomen’s devotional reading and writing practices in the Holy Roman Empire, across the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. It moves away from previous scholarly focus on exceptional women whose works were publicised and printed, to the lively subcultures of scribal activity that are near invisible in modern scholarship. Through a series of microhistories, I examine how women collected, read, annotated and made books as a means of cultivating both interior devotion, and diverse relationships with confessors, with monasteries, with their family members, and the parish community. I show how laywomen, through their engagement with books, cultivated religious authority in different roles as mothers, widows, spiritual interlocuters, disciples, pious and charitable citizens, and spiritually gifted and doctrinally knowledgeable Christians. By adopting a new chronological and confessional scope that crosses the boundaries between manuscript and print, Catholic and Protestant readers, and by taking a broader view of women’s textual practices to encompass not just formal authorship but habits of collecting, adorning, and marking books, as well as writing letters and spiritual notebooks, the dissertation uncovers a lost world of laywomen’s devotion.

My dissertation is set in the households and communities of friendship and Christian discipleship which women forged with kin, parish and pastors. While, from the fifteenth century, laywomen were increasingly enclosed within the walls of the newly reified cultural and social ideal of the nuclear, patriarchal household, they were nonetheless expert at making and sharing religious knowledge, at communing with the divine, and practicing devotional authority in their temporal world, both within their homes and beyond.

A copy of the dissertation will be available for review two weeks before the exam. Contact Lee Horinko for a copy of the dissertation and the Zoom meeting link and password.

All are welcome and encouraged to attend.