p. 25 “there is considerable uncertainty about the actual scale of women’s property ownership. A handful of studies have used rentals and leases to examine female landholding within small groups of manors or parishes. Jane Whittle, for example, demonstrated that female tenants rarely made up more than 10% of landholders on her four north-east Norfolk manors in the 15^th and 16^th century. Other studies of medieval landholding suggest that women made up between about 12 and 18% of tenants. Amanda Capern has demonstrated that women – most of women were widowed or single – made up 15% of leaseholders on the Jervaiux lands in North Yorkshire between 1600 and 1800, while Sylvia Seeliger has suggested that female tenants held up to 1/5 of the land in many Hampshire parishes between the mid-16th and mid-19^th centuries. Yet far less is known about the proportion of land owned – as opposed to tenanted – by women.

It is exactly this deficit that the remainder of the chapter sets out to remedy, exploring the issue of women’s landownership using a large sample of date from the parliamentary enclosure awards.

p. 26/7 “of the 250,000 acres catalogued here, almost 26,000 acres were owned by female landowners, that is 10. 3% of the land in the sample owned by a woman, either alone or jointly with one or more other parties. Female landowners were, moreover, a relative commonplace within rural communities up and down the country. As the data makes, clear, not only was more than one in 10 acres owned by a woman, but female landowners existed in the vast majority of the sample parishes….it seems likely that somewhere in excess of 3 million acres in England were owned by women in the later 18^th century and more than 6 million acres in Great Britain as a whole. The tally of female landowners – great and small 0 almost certainly ran into the tens of thousands and perhaps reached upwards of six figures.”

p. 40 While the involvement of middle-class women in business accounting has been increasingly acknowledged in recent years, the contribution of elite women to estate accounting has received far less attention. Yet some elite women kept very detailed estate accounts, rentals and ledgers. One such woman was Lady Elizabeth Dryden, a moderately wealthy widow who managed the Canons Ashby estate in Northamptonshire between 1770 and 1791. Despite an avowed dislike of writing letters, the accounts are written in her hand and cover the entire period of her management. In one book she recorded her annual outgoings against her yearly income, including her tenants’ rents and the sums she raised from the sale of underwood, bark and hay from the home farm and woods. Another book for the same period was organised by tenant rather than by year, and recorded the rents paid to her on a half-yearly basis, along with various memoranda concerning their tenancies. Her writing became increasingly untidy as she grew older … we know from a letter written to her niece that she suffered a stroke in 1790 and the shaky, almost illegible handwriting of the final year’s entry demonstrates that she wrote it after her stroke. This is testimony to Dryden’s sheer determination to record and audit the estate finances, but also definitive evidence that she kept her own accounts rather than relying on her steward.”

p. 41 “Elizabeth Hood of Butleigh Wootton (Somerset) kept the accounts for her modest estate not just as a widow but also as a young unmarried woman and a wife. Aged just 18, Wood inherited the Wootton estate from her father John Periam (d. 1788) and later married Alexander Hood, a captain in the Royal Navy who was killed in command of the HMS Mars six years later. The estate was a relatively small one: in 1806 the rentals brought her just over £1,000 a year, plus smaller sums for bark, corn and livestock and regular dividends from her funds in stocks. The core of the estate inherited from her father amounted to no more than 600 acres in 772, but Hood spent more than £11,000 purchasing land and houses in the neighbourhood, and her son’s portion of the estate amounted to nearly 1,700 acres in 1846. She was thus at the lower reaches of the gentry. .. Entries in the account book suggest that she had begun to keep the accounts prior to her father’s death in late 1788 … probably reflects her father’s failing health, but presumably also the desire by an elderly estate owner  – Periam was then 74 – to ensure his young heiress knew how to manage the estate… Her only brother had died before her own birth and Hood was brought up as the heiress to the estate, but we can only guess exactly what lessons her father provided for her. She was sent to Wells School from the age of 10 .. sometime later Hood wrote on the front cover of the account book, perhaps reflecting the lessons taught her as a young women:

Keep your accounts clear,

Throughout the year;

Let no mistake be made,

Either in paying, or pay’d.”

p. 79

“Lady Elizabeth Monoux was said by Arthur Young to be responsible for introducing improvements following the enclosure of wastes and warrens on an estate belonging to her husband at Sandy (Bedfordshire). The parish was enclosed in 1804 under an act of 1798, and both the act and the award recognised Sir Philip Monoux as the landowner. Yet [Arthur] Young attributed the improvements to his wide, noting that Sir Philip’s estate was ‘entirely under the management of Lady Monoux, who takes much pleasure in husbandry’. She had planted several parcels of the newly enclosed warren with oats and achieved excellent yields with the need to marl, limr or manure the land. In the previous year, Young also reported that she was growing Lucerne on portions of the the new enclosures, again with good results. The Lucerne was used as fodder for horses and was said to be ‘a very fine crop’ which over 20 weeks produced a yield valued at more than £9 n acre after the labour. Young praised ‘the agricultural talents on the intelligent farmeress” and her “very great exertions”.

p. 89 Elizabeth Illive, wrote at least one article for the Annals of Agriculture. “Also known as ‘Mrs Wyngham’, Ilive was the mistress of the third earl of Egremont, chatelaine at Petworth House (Sussex) and later countess of Egremont. Her origins are obscure and nothing is known of her early education, though she certainly had access to the large library of agricultural periodicals at Petworth House and probably also discussed agriculture with the earl – himself a keen agricultural improver – and his many visitors. In her 1797 article in the Annals, she described her experiments growing potatoes on land she had rented, making a careful study of the effect different methods of planting had on yields. Her work was underpinned by rigorous scientific method and demonstrated the value of planting the shoots removed from the chitted potatoes. The article appeared anonymously, the earl apparently having refused to allow her name to appear, though it is unclear if this was because of her gender or her unusual social position as his live-in mistress. [Arthur] Young commented specifically on Ilive’s piece, noting that she as an ‘ingenious lady’ and the article was ‘highly satisfactory, and proves clearly that the method detailed is of real importance.

The potato trials were not Ilive’s only scientific venture. Young – a regular visitor of the earl’s – also brought her equipment for the laboratory at Petworth House and taught her how to use it. In early 1796 she wrote to the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce describing a new method of using levers to raise large weights. Her letter – which included both a diagram and a model – outlined how the workmen on the estate ‘all approve of it very much,’ though she also hinted there had been some laughter at Petworth about her invention, at least initially. Her letter was apparently well received at the Society and the Mechanics Committee awarded her the silver medal in May 1796, the first woman to receive a medal from a scientific section of the Society, though others had previously won for Polite Arts. She was by then heavily pregnant with her seventh child and did not receive the medal in person, instead nominating the Society’s president Samuel More to collect it for her.”

p. 118 The most substantial programme of activities aimed at improving the lives of the poor was probably that undertaken by Elizabeth Prowse at Wicken (Northamptonshire) from the late 1760s onwards.. involved in a range of charitable activities both on her estate and beyond it. Some of this giving was irregular and ad hoc. Examples include providing five of her tenants with medicine after they were bitten by a rabid cat in 1776, helping one of her gardeners get sober and repay his debts, and finding apprenticeships and jobs for her coachman’s seven children when he suddenly left after being discovered ‘making money in what he had no right to do so’. She also made small gifts of money and clothes to villagers, local children and unnamed paupers, all of which were recorded in her pocket expenses. Such charitable acts were primarily reactive rather than proactive, but Prowse was also involved in a number of philanthropic projects which aimed to improve living conditions and educational achievements amongst the poorest Wicken residents in a much more systematic way… while undoubtedly a committed agricultural improver… Prowse was neveretheless uneasy about some of the things her predecessors on the estate had done in the name of progress. She was also aware that the social and economic costs of enclosure and estate improvement were often borne disproportionaely by the poorest in society. Her religious upbringing, staunchly Anglican beliefs and contacts with London Evangelicals and anti-slavery campaigners though her brother Graville Sharp no doubt played a part in shaping her attitudes towards farming, improvement and the poor, as did a close reading of Nathaniel Kent’s General View of the Agriculture of the County of Norfolk. Like Kent – whose Hints to Gentlemen of Landed Property she bought in 1775 and whom she probably met in Fulham in the winter of 1791 – Prowse seems to have recognised agricultural labourers as the very ‘nerves and sinews’ of rural society without whom ‘the richest soil is not worth owning’.

“Soon after acquiring the estate, Prowse embarked on a programme of repairs and improvements to the estate cottages. She paid for the cottages to be rethatched and glazed, and may also have installed water pumps in some of the cottages, as she did in the tenant farms … Prowse was paying for the cottagers’ children to attend a school in the village from at least 1768. She may have founded the school and certainly contri8buted significant sums to the running costs: in the mid-1770s she spent more than £30 a year on the schoolmasters’ wages along with clothes and shoes for the children, which together accounted for between about a third and a half of all spending in the cottage accounts. There were then at least 12 ‘charity boys’ in attendances, as well as several girls who were taught to make lace and cloth.. Prowse was also involved in establishing an early Sunday school at Wicken, which was first held in the spring of 1788. .. she continued to support both the day and the Sunday schools postmortem with the gift of a share in the Grand Junctions Canal Company, which by the 1830s contributed about £10 a year to the running costs.

p. 119 “Prowse … was concerned to provide locally available and affordable foodstuffs to her tenants … very little of the produce from the home farm was sold at the market. Instead, most of it was used in the house or sold locally, either to the village butcher or direct to the tenant farmers and labourers… sold meat and cheese to the poor at a subsidised price.. She sold a beef cow to the poor every winder at 2d a pound and in 1783 gave them the meat for here ‘it having been a hard winter for them’. She also sold firewood from the estate woodlands to the village poor, presumably again at a subsidised rate. Much of this activity was focused in the winter months, when conditions were at their harshest. Importantly, this was also the season Prowse spent in London and it is clear that she sought to improve conditions for the poor even whilst in the capital, something which Jessica Gerard argues was unusual amongst country-house women whose charitable hand-outs were not normally a year-round benefit to the rural poor.”

p. 123 “elite women .. might actively involve themselves in parliamentary politics, whether by controlling voters on their estates, by directly canvassing for particular candidates or by hosting political meetings and debates. One of the most straightforward ways … was to canvas their tenants and attempt to control their votes, either by only installing tenants whose political allegiance was already known or by evicting – or threatening to evict – those who voted against their wishes. Anne Lister worked hard to try to establish an interest at Halifax, suggesting names for Tory candidates to the head of the local selection committee, directly canvassing voters – both by letter and in person – and refusing to let her land to anyone but ‘blue tenants’. ”Regardless of their sex, most landowners expected to direct their tenants’ votes. Yet the moral case for tenants complying with the landowner’s wishes was arguably greater in the case of propertied women: as Lister wrote in her diaries, the tenants of properties women were doubly obliged to vote with their landlady, who was herself unable to vote and whose political views ‘would otherwise not be represented at all’.

p. 34 It is, moreover, notable that women appear to have played a significant role in literature and learning throughout the period, whether as recipients of complex and challenging Latin works, such as Aldhelm’s twin work in both prose and verse on virginity, sent to the nuns of Barking, or as teachers of ppetry and producers of their own verse, such as Eadburh, abbess if Minister-in-Thanet (d. 751) and her younger contemporaries Leofgyth and Berhtgyth, both of whom have left poems associated with Boniface’s mission to Germania. Powerful women in the late 7^th century also fostered learning and literature in the north, notably Abbess Hild of Whitby (614-680), whose monastery was the setting, Bede says, of the first Christian poetry in traditional Old English metre, by the illiterate cowherd Caedmon. Bede is uncharacteristically shy  about asserting that Caedmon reported his first faltering verses to Hild herself, and it seems likely that the supposed event took place in the time of her successors, Eanflaed (d. c. 685) or Aelflaed (654-714), respectively the sister and niece of King Aldfrith of Northumbria (r. 685-705), who himself had a well-documented interest in verse in several languages, including both Latin and Irish.”

p. 29 To highlight their roles in the creation of these texts while again asserting their authority, medieval writers called attention to their talents as readers, In so doing, these medieval writers not only reinforced their reliability as interpreters of ancient auctores and thus used the weight of these earlier writers’ auctoritas, but also established individual identities, by effectively saying ‘I, personally, am a better reader than others’.

For example, Deborah McGrady’s discussion of Christine de Pizan shows how a 15^th-century writer laid out her interpretative prowess as a reader of the Roman de la Rose and beyond in order to prove herself worthy of being read. Asserting one’s greater skill as a reader broke from Christian churchly tradition based on Augustinian truth, wherein all interpretations were accepted, because all of them were readings of the truth that comes directly from God. This emphasis on readerly skill worked, paradoxically, to establish writerly mastery: not of original texts, per se, but of texts made by individuals rather than by the ancients, the Christian community, or by God himself.

Vernacular writers deployed multiple textual and visual cues to assert this individuality. For example, a writer might use the frist-person pronoun ‘je’ to underline personal agency. By saying ‘I wrote’. ‘I compiled’ or ‘I read’, writers highlighted their existence and their participation in the process of reading, interpretation and finally writing…. A common trope in the Middle Ages was that of the author’s nightly writing, based on the vern ‘verillier’, many authors claim that they worked on their texts all night, thus underlining their personal role in its creation. This claim is not so much a way of asserting originality, but rather brings to the fore the many hands at work in medieval textual creation.”

p. 57 the iconography in 15^th-century medieval Books of Hours advance an image of Mary as a reader that linked female religious devotion with the act of reading. These manuscripts contributed to a socialization of the viewing subject that asserted the acceptability and even desirability of female readership as well as female literacy and education.”

p. 64 “It was Christine de Pizan who constructed one of the first conceptions of female authorship. She did so by constantly calling attention to her own identity as female writer, crafting her own literary authority, and positioning herself in the pose of reading or writing in the numerous manuscripts whose production she oversaw. Throughout all three of these processes, Chrstine drew upon Christian doctrine repeatedly, tapping into the cultural background between female literacy and devotion already at work in the Book of Hours.”

p. 77 [Antoine Dufour’s Vie Des Femmes Delebres – which used Boccaccio’s c. 1362 De mulieribus Claris and Jacopo Filippo Foresti’s De pluramis Claris selectisque mulieribus of 1497] ]  “Antoine Verard’s 1493 printed edition ultimately reveals three aspects of the context in which famous-women biographies were printed. First, the anonymous translator, like Antoine Dufour after him, specifies that his text is meant for women, thus indicating that there was a substantial female readership in late medieval France – or at least that either the anonymous translator or Verard believed this to be the case. Second, we can infer that either the publisher Verard or the anonymous translator (or perhaps, both) viewed Anne de Bretagne’s political and social influence on their intended audience to be expansive enough to motivate the dedication of their edition to her. Third, by stating explicitly that his text is meant to defend women, the writer of the dedication enters into a dialogue about the virtues and vices of the female sex, thereby underlining for us the debate’s cultural relevancy at the turn of the 16^th century. Finally, we can note the shift from Boccaccio’s writing to instruct women in 1392 to the Verard translator’s claim to defend them in 1493.”

p. 169 Anne de Graville is known to have read both male-authored querelle texts and Christine de Pizan’s works, assimilating these rhetorical and visual models into her own literary output.. Marguerite de Navarre read Christine de Pizan and grew up under the tutelage of her mother, Louise de Savoie… represent a contingent of women  who became authors in no small part due to their educational milieu and their exposure to Christine de Pizan’s works and those of the male translators studied in this book. … Pernetter du Guillet and her work reach outside of court circles and into a context of print readership in Lyon… Louise Labe, like Pernetter, also stood outside the more royal milieu surrounding Anne and Marguerite; yet, she also assimilated Christine’s call to write into her own address to female readers and the works of 15^th-century male translators into her poetic voice.”