I recently bought a copy of Carl Spizweg’s 1850 painting “The Book-Worm” for my apartment. The more I look at the oblivious old man standing on the ladder with books under his arms and between his knees, fondly reading yet another text in his hands, the more I recognize that my Inner Child and my Inner Warrior Princess have some company deep in the archetypal cavernous library of my mind. Still, I’d like to find a good archetype for a female scholar and/or bibliophile that might more accurately portray what I and so many of my friends recognize about ourselves.
One problem typical in women’s history is that the reality of women’s lives often far outpaces the (usually) male portrayal of them, particularly in books. Not quite two centuries ago, Jane Austen brought attention to this problem in her novel, Persuasion. The protagonist, Anne Elliot is having a heated discussion with her friend Captain Harville, about love and the comparative constancy of men and women. Harville says:
[W]e shall never agree I suppose upon this point. No man and woman would, probably. But let me observe that all histories are against you, all stories, prose and verse…. I do not think I ever opened a book in my life which had not something to say upon woman’s inconstancy. Songs and proverbs, all talk of woman’s fickleness. But perhaps you will say, these were all written by men. (Austen 220)
And Anne replies: “Perhaps I shall.—Yes, yes, if you please, no reference to examples in books. Men have had every advantage of us in telling their own story. Education has been theirs in so much higher a degree; the pen has been in their hands” (221). Education and literacy must perforce precede bibliophilia; a book can only serve as a conversation partner if a person can understand the language it speaks. And for centuries education was limited. During the middle ages, only the clergy were literate. When all texts were copied out by hand, the ability to read was far from a necessity, even for lords: that’s why they had clerks and scribes, who were usually priests. However, literacy could come in handy in other ways. “Benefit of clergy” meant that anyone arrested for a crime, who could prove he could read (and it was usually a man), could be tried by an ecclesiastical court rather than a civil court. When the difference in punishment for a serious crime could be, say, a pilgrimage rather than hanging, the benefit is obvious. (After all, pilgrims might actually return home alive.) This morsel of history helps explain both the connection of maleness with scholarship and, less directly, the deeply embedded misogyny of bibliophiles up until our own century.
The source of that less direct reason is Richard de Bury’s book Philobiblon. Richard, served as Cofferer to the King, Treasurer of the Wardrobe, and Clerk of the Privy Seal for King Edward III of England in the fourteenth century, and became Bishop of Durham in 1334. He traveled often on political business for the king and used his exhausting journeys in Europe as opportunities to collect books. But of course, he had been trained as a priest in a time when people were still busy blaming Eve for the sin of Adam and everybody else. So it’s no surprise to see, in Chapter IV, when he describes, “woman, to wit, whose cohabitation was formerly shunned by the clergy, from whom we have ever taught our pupils to fly, more than from the asp and the basilisk;...this beast, ever jealous of our studies, and at all times implacable” (34).
To find women role models for scholarship and bibliophilia then, it would seem that we are going to have to look closer in time to the (enlightened?) present.
Austen, Jane. Persuasion. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1990.
de Bury, Richard. Philobiblon. Trans. John Bellingham Inglis. New York: Meyers, 1899.
