Women Writing; Women Reading
The news from Hever Castle about a just-discovered story hidden in Anne Boleyn’s Book of Hours stopped me in my tracks, midway between the oven and the fridge. Since then, I have read everything that I can find on MA student Kate McCaffrey’s extraordinary work on the smallest of three prayer books owned by Anne Boleyn. This Book of Hours, a beautifully illustrated devotional guide, is the one that Anne is said to have passed to her ladies in waiting just before her execution on 19th May 1536. In this prayer book, Anne inscribed her signature and a rhyming couplet on the vellum:
“Remember me when you do pray,
That hope doth lead from day to day.”
Given the manner of Anne Boleyn’s death, these paired lines are extraordinarily poignant. Just one day after Anne’s execution, Henry VIII was betrothed to Jane Seymour and they married on 30th May 1536. As he began his third marriage, the King ordered the destruction of Anne’s personal correspondence and the records of her trial. On his instructions, Anne’s emblems were erased from all royal buildings built or renovated while she was queen and her portraits were destroyed or hidden. Henry VIII’s determination to remove Anne in person and in presence left his stonemasons and carpenters with a great deal of extra work; it also meant that anyone who cherished Anne’s possessions did so at considerable personal risk.
McCaffrey’s study of the Book of Hours, conducted over the last year or so, reveals that Anne’s prayer book was kept safe by the extended family of one of Anne’s ladies in waiting. This mostly female community treasured this book, adding their own names to its pages over the years in order to record their connection to its original owner. Eventually, and probably when this book was prepared for sale to a private collector in the nineteenth century, these names were erased leaving illegible marks on the vellum. Now, 485 years after Anne’s execution, Kate McCaffrey has been able to use ultraviolet light and photo editing software to reveal something of the book’s story in the decades after its owner’s death.
The Book of Hours that Anne is said to have carried to her execution was printed in Paris in around 1528 and one of McCaffrey’s remarkable discoveries is that Katherine of Aragon also owned a copy of this edition. I have only ever thought of Katherine and Anne as bitter rivals and of Katherine as the devout Catholic supplanted by a reformist successor who had once been her maid of honour. The knowledge that both women owned copies of this Book of Hours shakes my narrow perception of them as enemies in love and leaves me keen to know more about their mutual hopes for spiritual fulfilment.
In her late thirties, Katherine of Aragon commissioned Juan Luis Vives to write The Education of a Christian Woman. The book, published in 1523 and dedicated to Katherine, argued that women have the right to education and therefore it proved controversial at the time of its release. I wonder if Queen Katherine gave a copy of the book to Maud Parr (née Green), her lady in waiting. Katherine of Aragon was godmother to Maud’s daughter, named Kateryn, who turned eleven in 1523. Twenty years after the publication of The Education of a Christian Woman, this goddaughter who loved learning became Henry VIII’s sixth and final queen. Kateryn Parr was fluent in Latin, French and Italian and, after becoming queen, she studied Spanish, her godmother’s first language. On 8th June 1545, this learned woman published her own prayer book called Prayers or Meditations, which was the first book published in England by a woman under her own name and in the English language. It was also one of three devotional books that Kateryn published during her marriage to the dangerously volatile King.
These exceptional women – Catherine of Aragon, Maud Green, Anne Boleyn and Kateryn Parr – could all read and write and these skills became central to their lives and identities. Thinking of them takes me to an image that has long fascinated me: the tomb effigy of Eleanor of Aquitaine.
This powerful medieval woman, Queen Consort of France (1137–1152) and of England (1154–1189) and Duchess of Aquitaine by birth, lived an incredibly long life, dying in 1204 at the age of 82 in the place of her choice, Fontevraud Abbey in the Loire Valley. In her last years, Eleanor became a nun, choosing sanctuary and prayer to conclude a life full of the hurly burly of marriages, childbirth, loss, privilege, luxury and duty. This is a woman who rode to Jerusalem on crusade, who survived a massacre by Turkish soldiers, an attack by Byzantine ships, and who crossed the Pyrenees in winter, aged 78, in order to reach her granddaughters in Castile.
For some historians there is sufficient evidence to suggest that Eleanor commissioned her own tomb. Other royal women of the period certainly took responsibility for the making of memorials; these include Eleanor’s mother-in-law, Empress Matilda, who is thought to have commissioned a plaque in memory of her second husband, Geoffrey of Anjou. Whoever ordered it, the tomb effigy of Eleanor of Aquitaine is striking, even 916 years after her death. The tombs of her husband and son — to the left and right of her — show dead men lying in regal glory but Eleanor is depicted alive and contented. I love the composed energy of this stone image because it shows Eleanor reading in bed dressed in serene blue and white robes.
Studying images of her tomb again, a cup of coffee cradled in my hand, I know that I must avoid simplistic interpretations of this memorial effigy. Eleanor is not really in bed: she lies on a magnificent sarcophagus wearing a crown and the book that she holds is almost certainly a bible. This shape in stone and paint is designed to show a queen’s piety and virtue but this knowledge does not quell my excitement. Although Eleanor lived as a queen, although she was the mother of kings and the great grandmother of two saints, she is depicted as a reader for eternity. Eleanor’s lifelong relationship with books was encouraged by her father, William X, Duke of Aquitaine, who arranged an excellent education for his eldest daughter. This education provided the foundation for what we see in her lasting monument: a woman who enjoyed a life of the mind and a love of spiritual texts, poetry, and the romances narrated by the troubadours. Comparatively few women of Eleanor’s time were literate and those who could read did not necessarily have an equal proficiency in writing: some women learnt to read but not to write; instead, they dictated via scribes. Eleanor, however, could read and write in her regional French (Poitevin), in Latin and perhaps even in English.
There is so much in these interwoven threads of women reading and women writing that I would like to share with students. They could investigate women’s literacy and discover that convents offered girls the chance of an fine education. Perhaps some young women took the veil in order to become scholars as well as to serve God. I would also like my students to see if they could track down some of the books that existed in the twelfth century: what might Eleanor have read during her journey to the Holy Land, or as she travelled from one French castle to the next? Which books might her maids have packed for their queen as she crossed the Narrow Sea to England? And how were these texts made? Given that there was no printing press for another three hundred years, who wrote these texts and by whom were they illustrated and bound?
There would be more to this sequence of imaginary lessons: I would like my students to explore what reading means. What does it give us and where can books take us? What do readers have access to that non-readers are barred from? How might reading make us powerful? From there I hope that the students might grab this learning for themselves by investigating modern literacy rates in different parts of the world, and then by considering other forms of literacy; the World Health Organisation, for example, uses the term ‘health literacy’.
And I would choose to end this episode by returning to images. I would love students to consider Martini’s ‘Annunciation’, 1333; Rembrant’s ‘The Prophetess Anna’, 1631; Vermeer’s ‘Woman Reading a Letter’, c1663–64; Edward Hopper’s ‘Hotel Room’, 1931; Van Gogh’s ‘L’Arlesienne’, 1888–89; and Roussel’s ‘The Reading Girl’, 1886–87. I wonder if they might go from those pictures to Instagram to investigate images of twenty-first century women. How is the history and depiction of women’s reading and writing relevant to our evolving understanding of sex and gender?
