Newnham College Library has digitised its fifteenth-century manuscript copy of Epistre Othea

Newnham College Library has digitised its fifteenth-century manuscript copy of Epistre Othea (Othea’s Letter) by Christine de Pizan, the earliest professional female writer in Europe. Christine authored the Epistre Othea sometime between 1399 and 1402. It survives in forty-seven different medieval manuscripts and the College copy, known as Newnham MS 5, is now preserved online and accessible in high definition to students and researchers around the world. 

Christine de Pizan was born in Venice in 1364, the daughter of a court astrologer and physician. At 15, she married Etienne du Castel, the secretary to Charles V. She had three children by the age of 21, and was widowed by 25. She began writing, both as a scribe and as an author, in order to support her children, her mother, her brother, and her niece. Jane Chance describes her as ‘[t]he first French woman poet to make her living by the pen, the first female mythographer […] and first female literary theorist’. 

This manuscript was gifted to Newnham College Library from the collection of Henry Yates Thompson, who purchased it from E. Rahir in Paris, 1904. Yates Thompson wrote that ‘she stood absolutely alone among the women of her generation, and at her death at the age of 68 in 1431 it was not for centuries that any woman arose of equal literary reputation.’ 

The text of Newnham MS 5 is presented as an epistle delivered by Othea, Goddess of Wisdom, to the Trojan prince Hector, instructing him in the behaviour of a proper knight. Each section of poetry is accompanied by a miniature that depicts an assortment of divinities. Every page also includes two commentaries take the form of prose readings of the central text: on the left a "Glose", or gloss, providing explanations and contextual information to accompany the poem, and on the right an "Alegorie", or Christian allegorical reading ending with a line from Scripture in Latin. 

Newnham MS 5 is now available on Cambridge Digital Library, complete with an introduction by Dr Charlotte Cooper-Davis and Newnham alumna Dr Geneviève Young. This manuscript will join other archival objects on Newnham’s repository: the Piers Plowman manuscript MS 4; the War Work 1914-1918 book, which records the work done by over 700 Newnham women during the First World War; a Lawn tennis dress c.1880; a Steamboat Ladies Gown; and a Newnham College Boat Club rowing vest. Plans are now underway to digitise another of Newnham Library’s manuscripts: an eighteenth-century German recipe book.