Male Authors, Female Readers"Holy men despise women and view them as foul and sticking dirt in the road," asserst the male author of the fifteenth century Book to a Mother. Middle English devotional writings reflect shades of mysogony ranging from the blatant to the subtle, yet these texts were among the most popular literature know to the earliest generation of English women readers. In the first book to examine this paradox, Anne Clark Bartlett considers why medieval women