The Widow and Her Books. A Pioneering Woman in the Antwerp Printing Trade around 1500

When the Antwerp printer Roland van den Dorpe died at the turn of the fifteenth century, his widow, whose name is hidden in the shadows of history, took over the business her husband set up approximately five years earlier, in 1496. Although the continuation of a printing shop or a bookseller’s business by the wife of the deceased owner would become common practice in the Low Countries in the late sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth century, the late medieval roots of this practice in the early modern printing and publishing industry have not yet been examined. Roland van den Dorpe’s widow was – as far as we know – the first woman in the Low Countries to take on the task of running a printing shop. This article discusses her strategies in acquiring suitable copy for her business and her connections to the Franciscan Observants within the context of late medieval Antwerp.