Lecture: What the Paston Women Read

Location: Online

Event date: Thursday 16th October 2025

Lecture on The fifteenth-century Paston correspondence provides unique insights into the lives and book ownership of a late medieval gentry family, and also includes a large number of letters written by women. The literacy of the Paston women has been the subject of scholarly analysis, based on close scrutiny of the hands of the women’s letters and on close reading of their contents, and is still debated.  From this is seems that the most prolific of the correspondents, Margaret Mautby Paston, was almost certainly unable to write, and she called upon her sons, servants and chaplain to act as her scribes. All this is now well established. However, having limited or no literacy skills did not necessarily prevent access to literary culture. In this lecture, I focus on three of the women in the family—Agnes Berry Paston, her daughter-in-law Margaret Mautby Paston and Margaret’s daughter Elizabeth Paston (Yelverton)—and on three books either in their possession or that they may have read, in order to speculate about their interest in these works and how they might have influenced them.

Given by Professor Diane Watt is professor of medieval literature at the University of Surrey