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This collection reveals the valuable work that women achieved in publishing, printing, writing and reading early modern English books, from those who worked in the book trade to those who composed, selected, collected and annotated books. Women gathered rags for paper production, invested in books and oversaw the presses that printed them. Their writing and reading had an impact on their contemporaries and the developing literary canon. A focus on women's work enables these essays to recognize the various forms of labour -- textual and social as well as material and commercial -- that women of different social classes engaged in. Those considered include the very poor, the middling sort who were active in the book trade, and the elite women authors and readers who participated in literary communities. Taken together, these essays convey the impressive work that women accomplished and their frequent collaborations with others in the making, marking, and marketing of early modern English books.
List of contents
List of Figures
Notes on Contributors
Acknowledgements
Note on Texts
List of Abbreviations
1. Introduction: Locating Women’s Labour
Valerie Wayne, University of Hawai‘i at Manoa, USA
Part One: Making Books: Paper, Publishers, Printers
2. English Rag-women and Early Modern Paper Production
Heidi Craig, Texas A&M University, USA, and Editor, World Shakespeare Bibliography
3. Widow Publishers in London, 1540 - 1640
Alan B. Farmer, Ohio State University, USA
4. Female Stationers and Their Second-plus Husbands
Sarah Neville, Ohio State University, USA
5. Left to Their Own Devices: Sixteenth-century Widows and their Printers’ Devices
Erika Boeckeler, Northeastern University, USA
6. 'Famed as far as one finds books': Women in the Dutch and English Book Trade
Martine van Elk, California State University, Long Beach, USA
Part Two: Making Texts: Authors and Editors
7. Isabella Whitney amongst the Stalls of Richard Jones
Kirk Melnikoff, University of North Carolina, Charlotte, USA
8.'All by her directing': The Countess of Pembroke and her Arcadia
Sarah Wall-Randell, Wellesley College, USA
9. Katharine Lee Bates and Women’s Editions of Shakespeare for Students
Molly Yarn, Independent Scholar, USA
Part Three: Marking Books: Owners, Readers, Collectors, Annotators
10. Patterns in Women’s Book Ownership, 1500 - 1700
Georgianna Ziegler, Folger Shakespeare Library, USA
11. Reader, Maker, Mentor: The Countess of Huntingdon and her Networks
Elizabeth Zeman Kolkovich, Ohio State University, USA
12. Frances Wolfreston’s Annotations as Labours of Love
Lori Humphrey Newcomb, University of Illinois, USA
13. Afterword: Widows, Orphans and Other Errors
Helen Smith, University of York, UK
Index
About the author
Valerie Wayne is Professor Emerita of English at the University of Hawai‘i, in Honolulu, USA.
