Chapter 1 - The Book as Bloodline

Summary

Books, both real ones and those described in texts, are effective vehicles for women’s genealogies in medieval narratives because of their tactile form and ability to be transmitted. Medieval writers understood books not merely as containing genealogies but also as key participants in genealogical construction and propagation. This chapter explores books in the early twelfth-century Vita sanctae Margaretae reginae Scotorum, commissioned by the new English queen, Edith/Matilda, about her mother, Margaret of Scotland. The Vita asserts a maternal inheritance for Edith/Matilda premised in part on the literary patronage, physical interactions with books, and pious reading of mother and daughter, creating a nonhuman genealogy parallel to their biological one that negotiates a complex Anglo-Scottish-Norman history. This chapter examines the Vita in relation to depictions of book patronage by Emma of Normandy, Adela of Blois, and Constance FitzGilbert; submerged book miracles in the lives of Cuthbert, Columba, and Modwenna; and Margaret’s extant gospel book.