This essay considers queens and noblewomen as ߢmakersߣ of literary culture from the ninth to the sixteenth centuries, a period when they played key roles as patrons and book owners. Women such as Emma of Normandy and Edith of Wessex were involved in the production of and commissioned historical narratives, and were part of a wider Northern European network of culturally sophisticated aristocrats. Further evidence of the importance of understanding continental connections in élite womenߣs literary cultures is provided by Judith of Flanders, who joined the royal court in England and commissioned four highly ornate Gospel Books. Womenߣs literary and religious cultures often overlapped, as is illustrated in the examples of Margaret of Scotland, her daughter Matilda, her granddaughter Matilda, and her sister-in-law Adela, Countess of Blois. Eleanor of Aquitaine may be the most well-known example of a medieval literary patron but her activities were part of a wide-reaching culture of aristocratic womenߣs patronage that stretched across the globe.

The introduction explores womenߣs authorship and addresses the range of works by or attributed to women that were in circulation in England in the Middle Ages in the context of their contributions to a multilingual and inclusive literary culture. It examines the importance of collaboration, arguing that womenߣs writings may be collaborative in different ways: through amanuenses, through translation and adaptation, and through their historical and literary relationships with the men who write their lives. It explores other collaborative aspects of womenߣs literary culture, including womenߣs contributions as patrons, scribes, readers, and subjects of texts. It considers the importance of womenߣs religious communities, as well as the ways in which devotional books were owned by women and exchanged between nuns and by lay women, and it considers the active engagement of women with secular writing as owners and commissioners of books as well as writers. It argues that English womenߣs networks extend from Britain to the Continent and beyond.

The St Michael Collection (dating from 823 to 914) from the Fayum Oasis is the earliest extant group of painted Coptic manuscripts and is impressive because it has remained together as a cohesive whole. The manuscripts reveal aspects of monastic book production ranging from acquisition of materials to the practices of scribes and painters, as well as aspects of book culture, from the dedication of books to sharing them across a regional network of monasteries. The study of this unique collection allows the cost of these manuscripts to be estimated, using inferences about the materials, time, and effort required to produce them. The results of this analysis enhance our understanding of the relationships among patrons, books, monasteries, and scribes in the ninth and tenth centuries in the Fayum Oasis. Ultimately, this chapter argues that, within the context of the Egyptian monastic economy, the production of these books was not expensive. Yet, the cost of books in the medieval period was still perceived to be high.

Chapter 1 sets out the growth of the Province from 1221 to 1348, the different patterns of development in different parts of the British Isles, and what explains them. The first part of the chapter examines who supported the new foundations, how the English and Scottish kings in particular aided them, but also the role played by nobles and townsfolk. The second part of the chapter considers what lay behind this support, by looking at the friars’ life and ministry in relation to their supporters’ needs, how they met them directly, and how their religious life and training within the cloister enabled them to do this.

Chapter 5 studies the life of the Dominican friars on the English Mission from 1661 to 1850, in London where they were at first welcome at court or attached to embassy chapels, at their family seats, or as chaplains attached to recusant families on rural estates. It shows their normally good relations with patrons, but also their insecurity for most of the period in the absence of sufficient residences with a guaranteed income where one friar could succeed another in the local mission. The friars maintained their Dominican idenity through their liturgy, their spiritual reading, their letters, and meetings. As the Industrial Revolution took hold, they were able to gain more support from ordinary lay Catholics in urban parishes, but also required to fund the construction of new churches and schools, while the lack of recuits required them to withdraw from many missions.

Like all institutions, polities are physical things only in certain restricted senses. They can be materialised in practical facilities and visible symbolic expressions, both manifestations of the bundled schemas and resources that compose their structure. Yet in their conditioning of individual and group behaviour within idealised communities, polities emerge from, and essentially remain, “states of mind” (Yoffee 2005: 38–41). If we are to appreciate the sources of legitimacy and empowerment integral to governing authorities, we must turn our attention to how those minds saw politics as inherently entwined with the transcendent. The Classic Maya were far from alone in believing that political communities encompassed supernatural beings and the ancestral dead, not simply as distant abstractions but role-playing constituents.

Certain key themes, subjects and texts were considered to constitute a crucial educational foundation for an individual aspiring to achieve success in the court societies of the Persian Cosmopolis. This chapter argues that the character of this general education was deliberately ‘cosmopolitan’: based on a widely agreed canon of texts, both literary and scientific, whose importance was recognised across the Persian Cosmopolis. Rather than mere knowledge acquisition, the aim of this education was the formation of a specific type of disposition: a particular orientation towards the court society and towards the self. Underlying the external traits of this courtly disposition was a widely shared medico-philosophical understanding of the connections between mind, body and soul and the way in which the perfection of one, presupposed the engagement of the others. The implication of the body in the acquisition of knowledge and the perfection of the soul provides the rationale for directing attention to bodily practices and the influences of objects on bodies, a theme that recurs throughout this book.

One of the most crucial aspects of courtly life, in the Deccan, as elsewhere, was the ability to make friendships, enabling worldly success, movement to, employment at and escape from one court to another. This chapter examines the ways in which two individuals, Abd al-Karim b. Muhammad Nimdihi and Hajji Abarquhi managed to mobilise webs of interconnected networks that spanned the Persian Cosmopolis, in order to travel to, find employment at, and succeed at the courts of the Deccan sultanates. As well as networks, spaces and occasions for the demonstration and performance of friendship assumed a particular significance, and this chapter will examine one of these occasions: the majlis (courtly assembly).