Tracing the Past: Ashley’s Trustee Professorship

Kathleen Ashley, professor of English, will be able to continue her reconstruction of the lives of three medieval families who exemplify the emergence of the middle class through the support of the University of Maine System Trustees Professorship.
Ashley was selected by a faculty screening committee as the second recipient of USM's Trustee Professorship. The University of Maine System Board of Trustees established the Trustee Professorships in July, 1998 to support "outstanding University of Maine System faculty already making noteworthy contributions to academic excellence." The awards "provide release time for faculty to undertake research and other scholarly/creative endeavors not feasible within their normal workload." Tom Knight, associate professor of biology, was USM’s first Trustee Professor (see story, Currents, September 1999).

Ashley will use the time the award provides her to return for the spring semester to Burgundy, France where she first found in a library in Dijon the neglected 14th century French manuscript that has become the focus of her latest body of research. This manuscript is an unedited medieval “conduct book,” so called because it guided women in supporting the rise of their families through the social ranks by advising on behavior.

Ashley translated the manuscript of the “Miroir des Bonnes Femmes” from medieval French to make it available to other scholars because it is such an interesting text, she says, and a source book for later conduct books. Then she became intrigued by the names written in the book. In tracing the names, she uncovered a treasure trove of documentation on the book’s owners. Ashley found the book was owned by three interconnected families, affluent bourgeois citizens, who passed the book on to other family members from 1406 until the late sixteenth century. She could see immediately, she says, “the potential value of the Dijon manuscript as an entry into the lives of conduct book owners.”

She has completed her first book on the subject, ”The Miroir des Bonnes Femmes, Female Readers, and the Formation of Bourgeois Society,” that includes her translation plus a study of the owners, the transmission of the book through successive generations, and its cultural context. But she realized she’d accumulated enough data for a broader study that would describe the emergence of the middle class as it first became powerful politically and financially, through the history of these families as they intermarried and prospered between 1406 and 1625.

Her study, Ashley says, “will provide the basis for a more complex understanding of the strategies and practices by which a new social class assumed power and (unintentionally) defined their ideology, an ideology that has dominated western culture for over three hundred years.” She says this book will be the first “documented historical study of the reception of a medieval woman’s conduct book.” It is this project that she will advance during her year as Trustee Professor.
In the eleven years since Ashley found the “Mirror,” she has reconstructed the families’ upward mobility, through last will and testaments, marriage contracts, letters, financial contracts, town council records, church registers and other documents that showed where the families lived, whom they married, and how they climbed through the social ranks and acquired property and prestige. She has unearthed rich and varied stores of original documents in libraries and family archives. She has even located some of their still extant houses.

“As I walk around towns in Burgundy, the landscape for me is just filled with these people who lived 400 years or more ago because so many landscape features I’ve read about can still be seen. So much is there from that period in Burgundy; the landscape has not changed in major ways as it has in the US. It’s wonderful to do research there because of the continuity. The people in the towns, the postman, the grocer, and so on are excited about their local history and about my work and help me with suggestions.”

An especially rewarding find was a “Book of Hours,” a family record book which recorded in its margins births, deaths, marriages and historical events that affected the family between 1583 and 1898. The book, which has decorations that make it a work of art, had never been seen by someone outside of the family.

Ashley has made a number of research trips to Burgundy, including a sabbatical in 1997. During that visit, Ashley was elected as a research associate on Burgundian history at the University of Dijon. The honor recognized her contribution to the region’s history. She returned for month-long investigations in 1998 and 1999.

Ashley, who came to USM in 1978, received her B.A. and Ph.D. from Duke University and held an Andrew Mellon postdoctoral fellowship at Duke for 1978-79. Her research has been supported by two Fulbright scholarships, the most recent in the fall of 1998, and by Endowment for the Humanities grants.

In addition to “The Miroir des Bonnes Femmes, Female Readers and the Formation of Bourgeois Society,”which is not yet published, she is the author of “Medieval Urban Drama as Cultural Performance”(forthcoming); and coauthor of the book, “Writing Faith: Text, Sign, and History in the Miracles of Sainte Foy”(1999), and of “Reading Faith: The Cultural Work of Saints” (forthcoming). She is editor of the books, “Victor Turner and the Construction of Cultural Criticism: Between Literature and Anthropology”(1990) and “Moving Subjects: Processional Performance in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance” (2000); and co-editor of “Interpreting Cultural Symbols: St. Anne in Late Medieval Society”(1990),“Autobiography and Postmodernism” (1994) and “Medieval Conduct: Texts, Theories, Practices” (forthcoming). She is also the author of nearly 50 scholarly publications on medieval literature and drama, semiotics and textual analysis, and cultural theory.
Faculty who served on the committee that selected Ashley are Tom Knight , associate professor of biology, as former and first USM Trustee Professor; Diana Long, professor of history; David Silvernail, professor of education; Judy Tizon, associate professor of anthropology; and Margo Wood, chair and associate provost for graduate studies and research. Back to

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