A Book ofHer Own: Introduction
ROBERT G. BABCOCK
In A Room olOne's Own Virginia Woolfpresents her thoughts on a variety of topics related to women and literature: why did men write so much about women, bur women write so little about men; why did women before the end of the eighteenth century write so much less than men did; why were women writers in the nineteenth century drawn more to the novel than to other forms of writing; why is there such a disparity between the circumstances of the lives of real women and the female characters of (male) fiction; how did the social and economic conditions ofwomen in England prevent or discourage them from writing; what role was played by the lack ofa tradition ofwomen's writing that could have inspired women in that pursuit. The title ofWoolf'sessayrefers tooneofherprincipalconclusions,thatfor womento succeed as writers they need their own space, physical, psychological, and metaphorical, for writing-private spaces free from domestic cares or labors where they can devote themselves, undisturbed, to writing. Rooms of their own with "a lock on the door" to keep out children and husbands.
Woolf's title introduced a new phrase into the English language, frequently played upon as in the name of this exhibit; but it is not the only conclusion she draws. At least equally important to Woolf is her contention that a woman writer needs financial independence. She suggests that a prerequisite for a woman, ifshe wants to succeed at writing, is an independent income that would free her from the necessity of having a day job. Woolf expounds on the liberating effect of her own unexpected fate in being left, by the untimely death of an aunt, a bequest that ended her financial worries.
These economic considerations, however, were not Woolf's only concern. A third point she stresses, and one that is more immediately relevant to
Facing: Reason, Righteousness, and Justice speak to an audience of women. Christine de Pisan, Livre des trois vertus, Norrhern France, third quarrel' of the fifteenth century. See page 61.
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the present exhibition, is the "difficulty" that women writers before the nineteenth century faced "when they came to set their thoughts on paper ... that they had no tradition behind them." A writer needs books. Or to put it another way, a woman writer needs a room, and that room should be one with books in it, a library (of her own). The primary focus ofthis exhibition is the libraries of medieval and early modern European women, or more specifically the books that were in those libraries. To be sure, Woolfis thinking principally of a tradition ofwomen's writing-books written by women that could serve as models to aspiring writers. Indeed, she is more than a little dismissive of the potential value of books written by men to women trying to learn how to write.' Few, but precious, are the items in this exhibition that were both written by a woman and owned by a woman. But the exhibit does not intend to create or define a tradition ofwomen's writing; its purpose, rather, is much more limited: to identify and learn more about the books that were owned by medieval and early modern women.
Although Woolf is skeptical that books written by men were ofgreat use to women writers, she does not suggest the same about women readers, who, she remarks, turned for pleasure to books written by men just as readily as did their male counterparts. When she comes to discuss the portrayal of women in Shakespeare, in particular the disparity between the prominence and importance accorded women in his writings compared with their insignificance in histories of the Elizabethan age, Woolf expresses her exasperationat thelackofinformationavailable to heraboutthelivesofwomen before the eighteenth century, and she calls for more attention to this subject. Woolf argues for "a mass of information" to cere-write history," focusing on the lives of women; and she proposes to the female scholars in her audience that they undertake this study. In the three-quarters of a century since Woolf wrote, and in particular in the last thirty years, considerable scholarly attention has been directed to women's history, in particular to the collecting, editing, and publishing ofthe previously unpublished writings of medieval and early modern women. We also now have a considerable body of scholarly research: books, articles, and websites devoted to women's history, with texts, images, and bibliographical information in a quantity that might have surprised, might even have pleased, WoolU The field of "book history" has turned its attention to many aspects of the question ofwomen and literature in the early period, resulting in an extensive and growing body of information about books written by, for, and about European women in the medieval and early modern periods.3 The present exhibit addresses one aspect of this field.
"A Book of Her Own" focuses on a facet of the study of women and their books that has not, to my knowledge, ever formed the focus or rationale for a major exhibition. It is devoted to books with inscriptions or other ownership marks identifying the medieval and early modern women who owned the books. This is an exhibition of artifacts, the actual volumes that were owned by women in the early period, volumes in which they tell us, often in their own words and their own handwriting, that the books belonged to them. It is not, then, about books that modern scholars think women might have owned or should have read; it is not about books whose authors (male or female) intended that they be read by or to women; it is about the specific copies of books for which we have evidence that they were owned by a woman before the eighteenth century. This focus, intentionally narrow, was inspired by an increasing dissatisfaction with the imprecision in scholarly discussions of women's books about what, precisely, constitutes a 'woman's book.' I do not wish to suggest that only books with contemporary inscriptions or other explicit marks ofownership should be called 'women's books;' my goal was simply to discover how many books survive that have this characteristic, and what can be learned from such books about women and literature in the early period.
Genesis ofthe exhibition
The idea for this exhibition was formed in 1987, shortly after I became curator of early books at the Beinecke Library and saw for the first time the Yale manuscript ofJustinus that had belonged to Ginevra Nogarola.4 This was the only manuscript in the collection that was at all familiar to me before I came to Yale, for it was mentioned prominently in articles on women humanists by Margaret King, and it supplied the title to her collection of texts written by early modern women.5Mter I began to learn more about the manuscript and became more fascinated with it (for very little about the manuscript beyond its existence had ever been mentioned in print), I decided to search the Yale collection for other manuscripts and printed books dating before the seventeenth-century that had belonged to women. Finding that there were too few of them to form the basis of an exhibition (and that those present were ovetwhelminglyofone type, books ofhours), I began to acquire for Yale other volumes when I could find them in the rare book market; and these acquisitions form a considerable portion ofthe medieval manuscripts now exhibited.6
In the summer of2003, three Yale students, Torrence Thomas, D. Marshall Kibbey, and Elizabeth Archibald,? began to assist me in the preparation
