Libros miniare potestis: Religious women’s agency, literacy, and monastic book collections in Late Medieval Northern Italy

Abstract

Recent scholarship on women’s relationships with books has covered various issues: book production and collection, women’s education, and literacy, in close relation to spirituality and liturgy in the case of religious women. Research has focused on Central and Northern Europe, and more recently on Central Italy, whereas Southern and Northern Italian women’s monasteries remain less well-known. This chapter will address the libraries and scriptoria in some North-eastern Italian female monasteries, during the Late Middle Ages. They will be compared with other examples from Northern and Central Italy, and from other territories, mainly the Iberian Peninsula and Germany. The fragmentation and scarcity of the known corpus of medieval liturgical sources stemming from these monasteries makes the holistic approach adopted here crucial for this research. Sources such as library catalogues, chronicles, sacristy inventories, official city property registers: the Castastico or Estimo, will be taken into account. Miscellaneous volumes will be discussed as vehicles for the transfer of knowledge, exploring the close relationships between liturgy and learning. Finally, this article will examine nuns’ role in promoting the circulation of manuscripts through different networks, as well as in the production of liturgical books, alone or in collaboration with friars or priests or external illuminators. The word ‘miniare’ will be reconsidered to distinguish nun’s work – mainly the execution of pen-illuminated initials in red and blue ink – from the illumination of historiated initials by lay illuminators.