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D. H. Green, Women Readers in the Middle Ages

Encyclopedic, explosive, pointed—these are the adjectives that leap to mind as I reflect back on the experience of reading D. H. Green’s masterful study of medieval women readers, more specifically those we can identify in the written traditions and cultures of Germany, France, and England, from the earliest examples found in the eighth century, through the expansions of the exuberant twelfth, and on into the teeming world of the late Middle Ages from the thirteenth to the end of the fifteenth century. The weight of information marshaled here is overwhelming and will no doubt exceed even the best-trained memory, which suggests one use of this study as a reference book, a first place to return whenever future projects inspired by it are undertaken, whether for teaching or research. (Green himself projects a companion volume, Gendered Reading around 1200, in which he will focus on how male authors of three German romances, and their French models, especially appealed to women readers.) But the mass of evidence presented never obscures the clarity of Green’s presentation and the pathbreaking potential of his analysis, important features that suggest that another valuable use of this work will be in reconceptualizing and reorienting our way of thinking about the problems explored in defining and distinguishing the multiple relationships medieval women entertained with the written word. The problem of definitions is critical, as attested by Green’s opening discussion of how literacy in the Middle Ages was typically defined by earlier literary historians in ways that excluded many male as well as female readers, thus perpetuating the hegemonic claim of medieval clerical authors who would equate literacy with Latinity and thereby consolidate clerical