Resumen de An Anglo-Saxon psalter and an early modern female reader
British Library Manuscript Stowe 2 (Stowe Psalter) is a late Anglo-Saxon book in Latin with a continuous Old English gloss. Its marginalia include the name "Kateryn Rudston", written in an apparently sixteenth-century hand, the same hand wrote "Kater" forty-four pages later and may also be evident in the rewriting of some Old English glosses. The signatures offer a rare example of female access to and perharps readership of an Anglo-Saxon book in the sixteenth century, and they prompt exploration of why this particular psalter may have survived in private hands, how it might have been used by a sixteenth-century woman, and who that woman might have been.The search for Rudston does not yield conclusive identification but reveals enough plausible possibilities to suggest that Anglo-Saxon books were accesible to women and could have had interest for a wide range of women, in and beyond the sphere of major collectors.
