Women as multilingual readers in late medieval Flanders : exploring the manuscript evidence

The relationship between the literary patronage of women and the increasing popularity of vernacular literature has been well studied in historical and literary research. The language of literary patronage was not only influenced by gender, but also by the intersectionality of social status. In the last few decades, in-depth analyses of the book collections and libraries of individual women, as well as of female communities, have addressed the complex factors influencing women’s reading practices and literary patronage. This contribution offers a quantitative and qualitative analysis of female book ownership from a multilingual perspective. Examining the extant manuscripts owned by women in the late medieval County of Flanders, it shows how monolingual manuscripts hide a multilingual reading context and, moreover, that multilingual utterances often resulted from cross-generational reading and rewriting practices.