So spoke ‘Sceltonyus Lawreatus’ (the attribution occurring solely in British Library, MS Harley 2252) through the satirical mouthpiece of the Everyman persona of Collyn Clout. In this second of what are usually taken to be attacks on Cardinal Wolsey, Skelton makes quite clear the threat of imprisonment under which he writes. His comments about printed publication may explain why the earliest extant edition, by Thomas Godfray in ?1531 (STC 22600.5), did not appear until after the deaths of both Wolsey (29 November 1530) and Skelton himself (21 June 1529), especially since the two men had achieved a reconciliation by late in 1523, when Skelton publicly praises the cardinal, along with the king, in the final (Latin) envoy of the Garlande of Laurell, printed by Richard Faques on 3 October (STC 22610; Scattergood 2014: 351). While the supposed imprisonment of William Cornysh Junior, Gentleman of the Chapel Royal, in the Fleet prison in 1504 for writing a seditious poem remains a matter for debate (his imprisonment is stated in the prologue to the ‘treatise bitwene Trouth, and Informacion’ published in John Stow's Pithy pleasaunt and profitable workes of maister Skelton, Poete Laureate, printed for him by Thomas Marshe in 1568 [STC 22608]), it is known that in 1515 Polydore Vergil was sent to the Tower for writing a letter criticising both Wolsey and the king (Scattergood 2014: 354). In the early 1520s John Colyns, the owner/compiler of British Library, MS Harley 2252, knew of the imprisonment of Edward North for composing poetry against Wolsey, although later in his career he distinguished himself in royal service. (In all probability Skelton also knew of North's fate.) ‘The Ruyn of a Ream’ and later a ‘complaynte’ to Wolsey were written by North while he was still in prison; the latter poem ends ‘Surely all ynglond for hym ys bownde to pray’, and these compositions seem to have served their purpose, for he was released in January 1525 (Meale 2013: 83–4, cat. nos 46, 49).

We must begin with names. ‘Tony Edwards’ is the person to whom this volume is dedicated, but it is not a name that everyone will immediately recognize, particularly those who know him only from his published work, for he has made himself known in public, from the first, as A. S. G. Edwards. When he began his career, this was the manner in which most scholars, most men at least, named themselves. Fashions have changed, and given names, one, two, or more, are now almost universal. But Tony has held on tenaciously to his initials, perhaps because he has three of them. We do not believe that he did so in any spirit of emulation of or desire to align himself with ‘Edwards A. S. G.’, the Edwards Active Strain Gauge well known to Google, an advanced form of technical engineering equipment which guarantees the vacuum conditions needed for the manufacture of certain precision instruments, such as aircraft engine turbine blades. It seems strangely apt as an analogous form of ‘A. S. G.’, whether one thinks of the ‘active strain’ involved as what he exerts upon himself or upon other people. The analogy fails, of course, when one comes to the creation of vacuum, where it works back to front, for Tony's work has essentially been to fill the vacuum that once existed in the study of manuscript history.

The name of Katherine de la Pole holds little resonance today, despite the fact that she was born into a family whose dynastic ambition and ability to exercise and manipulate political power in the fifteenth century were, and remain, notorious. Born c. 1416, Katherine was the only daughter of Thomas de la Pole of Grafton Regis in Northamptonshire, younger brother of Michael, the second Earl of Suffolk, who died at Harfleur at 1415. She was thus first cousin to William de la Pole, the fourth Earl and first Duke of Suffolk, husband of Alice Chaucer. The dela Pole affinity was to remain important to her throughout her life, but to the eyes of the historian and literary historian, more important were her marriages, particularly her first. This was in 1438, when Katherine married Miles Stapleton of Ingham in Norfolk, who was knighted in 1444/5; he was some eight years her senior, and she was his second wife. As Lady Stapleton, Katherine was to achieve a unique position: she was, with Sir Miles, the joint dedicatee of a Middle English romance – John Metham's Amoryus and Cleopes – the only woman known to have held this position within the genre of romance. Within the text itself she is the subject of an encomium describing her lineage(somewhat inaccurately), and eulogizing her as ‘Modyr off norture’ (line 2161).

The question framed by the title of this essay is ostensibly a simple one: how did middle age affect women’s roles as commissioners, owners and readers of books? If they were married, and had survived the rigours and dangers of childbearing, did their interest in the sphere of cultural activities develop as they grew older, and were they able to achieve a degree of autonomy in pursuit of them? If they did, to what extent was this dependent on their marital and financial positions, or on their class status? Before it is possible even to consider these questions another is raised, for it is not even immediately evident what age group we should be examining: what becomes clear from life-cycle studies, innovative and informative as many of them are, is the lacuna where middle age should be. Other stages of life – the menarche, age at marriage, widowhood and old age – have all been subjected to scrutiny, but it is as though women pass through a barrier of invisibility when they enter middle age. There is, though, a medieval text which deals explicitly with women’s ageing, the Cause et Cure, generally attributed to the abbess and visionary Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179); this work tackles all aspects of women’s sexuality and reproductive cycles with judicious specificity:

The approximate age of fifty for the menopause is not dissimilar to today, but it must be borne in mind that Hildegard (if she was indeed the author of this text) was writing from within the confines of a secluded group of women whose diet, if not luxurious, was consistent, and allowance should therefore be made amongst the general population for the effects of poverty, poor diet, illness and shorter lifespan. For the purposes of this study, however, if ten years either side of fifty is allowed, a working schema of the ages of forty to sixty can be used to establish a timeframe for looking at the middle-aged woman and the book.

The possession and use of books as a means of registering and affirming cultural identity within both private and public spheres is a familiar, and transhistorical, phenomenon. A more precisely focused insight into the roots of this phenomenon during the medieval period, one dependent upon the recognition of historical contingency, has come to characterize much of the recent work on the book collections established by royal and noble patrons in England. It is now widely accepted, for example, that the volumes acquired from Flemish workshops by Edward IV and various of his associates, both in the choice of subject matter and in their lavishness of production, served to ally the Yorkist regime with a politically and culturally dominant elite within the French-speaking north of Europe. But significant as the book-collecting activities of members of this particular class undoubtedly were, any analysis of cultural formations in England during the later Middle Ages should also acknowledge the centrality of the gentry as commissioners and owners of books for, just as the gentry's power as a social and political force within the country was developing during this period, so this grouping formed a major – and expanding – constituency for those involved in the professional production of books. It is this coincidence, or interrelationship, between the political and the more broadly defined `cultural', that I intend to explore in the following discussion of Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Digby 185.

Digby is notable as a book for the generic eclecticism of its contents – which range from the Middle English Brut (this version of which ends with the capture of Rouen by the English in January 1418/19, fols. 1r–79r); to poems by Hoccleve (The Regement of Princes, and the Gesta Romanorum tales of the Emperor Gereslaus and of Jonathas, from the so-called Series, fols. 80r–144v, 145r–157r, 157r–165r); to a (near-) contemporary translation into English of the French prose romance of Ponthus et Sidoine (fols. 166r–203r); and for its decoration, which consists primarily of armorial shields incorporated within elaborate initials which, in the main, are placed at the openings of the texts that now comprise the volume. The manuscript's connection with the gentry family of Hopton has long been accepted.