Books of Duchesses is a collaborative project that collects, organizes, and presents data related to late-medieval laywomen and their books. Through an interactive map of Europe, users are able to visualize networks of manuscripts, texts, and readers and explore the libraries and peregrinations of woman book owners. The data collected in the project has the potential to shift scholarly paradigms by challenging narratives of national literary history and uncovering the active role played by women in creating and consuming literary and material culture and in circulating texts across national, geographic, and generational borders. The geographic scope of the project is currently mostly focused on Western Europe. The time frame of the project is 1350 and 1550, a period of intense political, interfamilial, and interpersonal changes and exchanges due to the Hundred Years War and its aftermath. The project focuses on laywomen and therefore excludes books owned by enclosed religious women and female religious institutions. At the moment, the core of the data concerns aristocratic laywomen, as this information is the most readily available. In the future, the scope of the project will expand to include women from other social classes, additional geographic and linguistic regions in and beyond Europe, and data from the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries.
The project’s research methodology is designed to accommodate the inherent ambiguity of women’s book ownership without sacrificing accuracy. The project includes both extant and non-extant books and both confirmed and possible instances of book ownership. Each instance of ownership is further defined by noting the type of evidence used to connect owner and book. Some ownership evidence is found in extant manuscripts (inscriptions, patron portraits, coats of arms etc.) while other ownership evidence comes from primary documents such as wills, inventories, household documents, and letters. “Other” evidence includes a secondary article or catalogue entry where evidence type in the source is not otherwise specified.
The project also accommodates ambiguity in textual identification. It is not always possible to identify a text found in a non-extant book. For example, a non-extant manuscript described as “a French book” in a woman’s inventory will be cataloged as including an “Unidentified French Text.”
Finally, the project includes both precise and approximate information about the geographical locations of women book owners and of books as possible. In some cases we are able to record the exact day, month, and year when a woman was at a particular location. In other cases, we make an educated guess about a woman’s whereabouts at a particular time. We choose to include this ambiguous data in order to make more women book owners visible on the map. For the books, we include information about their location when it is sufficiently well documented (as by a letter, inventory, will, or library catalog, for instance).