Catherine Innes-Parker was interested in the subject of reading-circles formed by female readers and book owners, and thus part of her work was centred on the influence of one generation of women on another through bequests. In her 2003 essay on the dissemination of the Ancrene Wisse in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, Catherine explored reading circles, ownership and bequests of manuscripts among religious and laywomen. More recently, she examined the French prose translation of Bonaventure's Lignum vitae at Montmartre under Abbess Antoinette Auger, focusing on the transmission and translation of the books they were reading. Such manuscripts-based studies did, indeed, uncover the reading of women in the high and late Middle Ages, allowing them to speak to us today.

In this essay, I would like to explore the devotional library of Cecily Neville (d. 1495), duchess of York and mother of Edward IV and Richard III, focusing on her bequests of religious texts. Cecily was an avid recipient of newly translated revelatory texts targeted originally for Syon nuns in the early fifteenth century. They include Birgitta of Sweden's Liber celestis, Catherine of Siena's Dialogo (known as The Orcherd of Syon in Middle English) and Mechthild of Hackeborn's The Boke of Gostely Grace, a translation of the Liber specialis gratiae. These texts were translated into English in a Carthusian or Birgittine milieu, as a response to the monastic reform led by Henry V. They were also selected by a Carthusian author of Sheen to be interspersed in his Speculum devotorum, a fifteenth-century Middle English life of Christ, based on the Meditationes vitae Christi. In the prologue to this book, he memorably calls these mystics ‘approuyd wymmen’, probably because he found their visions orthodox and edifying. All three translations were disseminated as approved texts of vernacular, mystical material in fifteenth-century England and their readers included the female nobility and the wealthy laity.

This interest in the vernacular devotional texts represented by those translations of the approved women is notably attested in the reading of Cecily Neville. The Yorkist matriarch was born in Raby Castle, Durham, and married Richard, duke of York. During a life marked by political vicissitudes, Cecily and her family moved about in England and across the Channel, as the variety of her children's birth-places bears witness. One of the homes Cecily and Richard set up was Clare Castle in Suffolk.