The widow and her books: a Pioneering woman in the Antwerp printing trade around 1500

Abstract

This article explores the printing business of the widow of Roland van den Dorpe within the urban context of Antwerp.

However modest in scale, the business of Van den Dorpe’s widow does show that when a woman continued her husband’s printing business in the early 1500s in Antwerp, she was able to put her stamp on the work she produced. A close examination of the works the widow printed shows that she did depart from her husband’s editorial program, tapping into her own new associations and thus contributing to the intellectual and religious life in the town where she worked and beyond. In order to acquire texts suitable for printing, the widow must have had a network at her disposable that was already initiated by her husband, but that she was able to broaden. The first text she printed came from the Franciscan Observant friars who most likely familiarized her with the text. This shows the importance of religious houses and networks for the mobility and dissemination of texts. The widow would not have been the first woman to be in touch with the Observant friars minor, nor the last. The woman for whom Hendrik Herp initially composed the Spieghel der volcomenheit was a widow herself and Herp was her father confessor. In the first half of the sixteenth century the Antwerp schoolteacher Anna Bijns had strong connections with the Observant friars: one of them, Bonaventura Vorsel, is believed to have been her father confessor and even a close friend of hers.