Reading Families: Women’s Literate Practice in Late Medieval England by Rebecca Krug (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 237 oped sense of how these practices relate to one another. For example, the concept of subject formation comes up several times, but since Kobialka never explores the interplay between medieval representation and subject formation in any systematic way, these references are both distracting and frustrating. In his introduction he states that “in the process of establishing links, patterns, and developments, an object is marginalized by the system of structures that organize its meaning” (26). While I appreciate the corrections to previous scholarship that Kobialka’s approach allows him to make, I found myself wishing he had allowed himself more leeway to establish just such “links, patterns and developments .” NORA RYAN, Slavic Languages and Literatures, UCLA Rebecca Krug, Reading Families: Women’s Literate Practice in Late Medieval England (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press 2002) ix + 238. As citizens of an industrialized nation, our relationship to the written word is largely taken for granted. Many of us, I presume, additionally tend to forget that access to literate culture was, and in some places still is, not a universal right. This naiveté consequently distorts our understanding of particular social artifacts and practices, both past and present, on a frequent basis. Perhaps the acknowledgment of this shortcoming is what makes Rebecca Krug’s study of women and literacy all the more interesting as it carefully challenges assumptions about literacy and literary production in the late Middle Ages. In Reading Families, Krug applies the anthropological concept of practice theory to the subject of women and textual culture in fifteenth century England in order to approximate better the more common, routine interactions women had with written word. In the process, she discovers the advent of female literacy in the collision of two cultural phenomena: the definition of self and world through family connections and the expanding textualization of medieval society. Medieval people, Krug writes, watched their immediate surroundings become increasingly delineated by the written word. As a result, women were compelled to engage literate society if only to further the practical interests of the household. To illuminate her line of reasoning, Krug presents hard evidence of feminine literate practice culled from four different, but analogous “family units.” These case studies introduce individuals working within and eventually reconstructing larger cultural frameworks, both literal and figural. In each instance , Krug finds that ultimately, family concerns prompt and shape feminine interactions with written texts. This sort of literate practice evolves with age and experience, and in time, comes to impact not only these women’s selfidentities , but ties with parents, husbands, in-laws, and children. Chapters 1 and 2 consider the literate practices and family standing of two women, one gentry, one aristocratic. Krug begins her examination with Margaret Paston’s letters to her husband and son. In them, she determines that Margaret ’s understanding of writing is influenced primarily by her husband John’s legal profession and secondarily by effort to confirm the Paston family’s gentle status by mean of written documents. Both instill a heightened belief in the written word’s power to convey and record for posterity truth and/or history. As a result, Margaret thinks of her letters to John as receipts of daily household affairs. When John accepts and validates her letters as accurate representations REVIEWS 238 of events, Krug notices that Margaret’s position of authority and agency within the family increases, as does her faith in her own literate identity. As the chapter progresses, Krug outlines the ways in which Margaret’s unwavering credence in written text creates conflict with her son, one of a generation who holds a much more cynical view of the trust placed in physical documents. John II, doubtful of textual objectivity, rejects his mother’s literate and thus familial position of influence, forcing her to reinvent an effective mode textual interaction between the two. In the case of Margaret Beaufort, Krug’s chapter tempers past judgments of her involvement with printing presses by more closely considering the larger tradition of literary practice that shaped her. The grounds for female literacy in the aristocratic family were as equally pragmatic as they were among the gentry. Women’s relationship with the written word above all...