Participant Info

First Name
S.C.
Last Name
Kaplan
Country
United States
State
LA
Affiliation
Louisiana Tech University
Website URL
https://sckaplan.com
Keywords
women's libraries, medieval, pedagogy, Burgundy, Bourbonnais, manuscripts, paper, literature, Christine de Pizan, Antoine de La Sale, Melusine, fifteenth century, Agnes of Burgundy
Availability
Media Contact
Additional Contact Information
PhD
PhD

Personal Info

Photo
About Me

I specialize in 15th-century French and Burgundian women’s libraries and the ways women in which women transmitted knowledge to each other. My first book, Women’s Libraries in Late-Medieval Bourbonnais, Burgundy, and France: A Family Affair (Liverpool University Press, 2022), elucidates women’s relationships with their books, whether bought, inherited, or commissioned, and in so doing, explicates how they may have shared literary ideas and intellectual preferences, thus strengthening their relationships with ladies within and outside of their immediate family. I maintains multiple ongoing open access projects, including Middle French Transcriptions and  Mapping Women Book Owners: 1350-1550, a digital humanities project which aims to collect, organize, and present data related to medieval laywomen and their books, created in collaboration with Sarah Wilma Watson (Independent Scholar).

Recent Publications

“‘Oncques ne vy plus plaisant compaignie’: Jubilant Poetry as Record of Women’s Puissance,” Journal of the Early Book Society 28 (2025): 121-47

“Constructing Community in Late-Medieval French Lyric,” (contributing author with Lucas Wood and Elizaveta Strakhov), Journal of the Early Book Society 28 (2025): 83-86

“Quantitative and Qualitative Bibliographical Analysis as Literature Review.” In DH+BH: An Interdisciplinary Collection on Digital Humanities and Book History. Illinois Open Publishing Network, 2025. https://iopn.library.illinois.edu/pressbooks/dhbh/chapter/kaplan/

“Ascending the Mountain in Antoine de La Sale’s Paradis de la reine Sibylle: The Mental Pilgrimage at the Heart of a Secular Text,” Le Moyen Français 94 (2025 for 2024): 165-80. DOI: 10.1484/J.LMFR.5.144058

“Books of Duchesses: Mapping Women Book Owners, 1350–1550: Five-Year Report” (co-authored with Sarah Wilma Watson), Journal of the Early Book Society 27 (2024): 99-122

“Jeanne de Bourbon, Reader of the Grandes chroniques de France,” Manuscript Studies 9, no. 2 (2024): 336-40. DOI: 10.1353/mns.2024.a945379

“Isabeau de Bavière’s Books: A Reassessment,” Manuscripta 67, no. 2 (2024 for 2023): 171-223. DOI: 10.1484/J.MSS.5.143577

“Newly Identified Manuscripts Belonging to Gabrielle de Bourbon-Montpensier,” Journal of the Early Book Society 26 (2023): 223-30

“A Library of Lost Works: Non-Extant Books as Evidence of Female Reader Networks,” Pecia 24 (2023 for 2021): 221-38. DOI: 10.1484/J.PECIA.5.132380

Women’s Libraries in Late Medieval Bourbonnais, Burgundy, and France: A Family Affair (Liverpool UP, 2022).

“Transcribing ‘Le Pèlerinage de Damoiselle Sapience’: Scholarly Editing Covid-19 Style” (contributing author with Laura Morreale, Tamsyn Mahoney-Steel, and Kersti Francis), Digital Medievalist 15, no. 1 (2022). DOI: 10.16995/dm.8071

“Intellectual Siblingship: Philip the Good’s Book Gifts to Agnes of Burgundy,” in “The Book as Cultural Actor,” ed. Aria Dal Molin and S.C. Kaplan, special issue, Digital Philology: A Journal of Medieval Studies 10, no. 2 (2021): 290-309. DOI: 10.1353/dph.2021.0013

Media Coverage
Country Focus
France
Expertise by Geography
France
Expertise by Chronology
Medieval
Expertise by Topic
Book History, Gender, Material Culture, Pedagogy, Women