Parish Libraries and Women’s Book ownership: Katherine Lumley’s Books

The Stainton Parish Library, left to Stainton vicarage in 1694 by vicar Richard Lumley and now held by York Minster Library, contains about 60 texts that have been signed by a woman, probably Richard’s wife, Katherine Lumley. These texts are unusual for an early modern woman, particularly one of her class: they are primarily in Latin, Greek and Hebrew, with only a few English books, and many were mainstays of a humanist education, and thus would have been largely aimed at men. This paper will examine the texts that were claimed by Katherine Lumley, exploring what they can tell us about her as a book owner, her identity as a potentially multi-lingual clergyman’s wife, and about women’s roles in parish libraries more generally.

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HANNAH JEANS is a lecturer in Early Modern History at the University of York, and works on readership and gender in the early modern period. Her recent monograph, Reading, Gender and Identity in Seventeenth-Century England, was published by the University of London Press in 2025. She is currently working with several library collections at the Minster Library and the Borthwick, and on a project about early modern women news readers.