A 'worldly occupacioun': English women's readership and patronage of medieval secular literature, 1350--1500

This dissertation disputes the familiar opposition between the categories of sacred literature and secular literature in the Middle Ages and redefines the secular as a hybrid category that supports multiple reading practices. I argue that many examples from the so-called secular genres of the Middle Ages, such as historical chronicles and romances, represent a fusion of the secular and the sacred. The category of secular literature is governed and defined largely in terms of its readership: how were these works being read by a medieval audience and in what contexts? Women's readership in particular offers a productive lens through which to study the blending of sacred and secular literature in this period. Much of the modern scholarship on medieval women's reading habits emphasizes the highly devotional nature of their literary tastes; women read and bequeathed religious material such as Psalters or Books of Hours on a large scale in the Middle Ages. Yet "popular" medieval literature---chivalric romances and chansons de gestes in particular---is often characterized as "women's reading," much like the romance paperbacks of today. My project uses, in part, manuscript and textual evidence of medieval women's readership as a vehicle for re-construing the secular category and, in turn, posits a more detailed model of female reading tastes in the Middle Ages.