In the past fifteen years, there has been a surge of interest in women's book history. This collection makes a significant contribution to the field by offering new strategies for locating historical data, new frameworks for interpreting data, and new arguments about individual female stationers, writers and editors, and readers. The collection is organized around the concept of women's labor. As Valerie Wayne notes in her introduction, women's labor has not been a central concept in the study of early modern book history; here, it proves to be a fruitful organizing principle that asks us to consider together the various forms of work undertaken by women of different social classes. Thus we find essays on poor and middle-class women involved in the financial and material practices of book production; essays on elite or educated women who were authors or editors; and essays on middling and elite women who read, collected, and annotated books. All the essays discuss the challenges of working with early modern imprints, the bibliographic records in the STC, and the databases that often obscure women's labor. In response, the authors offer a diverse set of strategies for teasing out, speculating about, and assessing women's activities. The collection explicitly builds on Helen Smith's ‘Grossly Material Things’: Women and Book Production in Early Modern England (2012), and she provides the afterword.
The first section deals with women who labored in making books. Heidi Craig examines representations of the itinerant women and girls who scavenged the rags that were used to make paper. The next four essays (and the introduction) examine stationers, and the reader will want to have EEBO open while reading these chapters. Alan Farmer identifies a previously unrecognized network of widow stationers from the 1630s and debunks the notion that printers’ widows were often pursued by men who wanted to take over their dead husbands’ businesses. Sarah Neville examines stationers who printed works under their names but were also involved in the production of texts that make no explicit references to them. She argues that scholars should consider the number of “edition-pages” produced by stationers rather than the number of editions. Attending to visual cues, Erika Boeckeler discusses widows who used printers’ devices to affirm their role in book production, while Martine van Elk compares the business strategies and self-presentation of stationers in the Dutch Republic and in England. In one of her footnotes, Boeckeler notes that scholars need more reference tools pertaining to female stationers; this is true, and both Farmer and Van Elk provide valuable lists as appendixes.
The second section turns to women who labored in making texts as authors and editors. This is familiar terrain for scholars trained in literature departments, but the concept of the author/editor as a maker is enriched as we are prompted to consider literary labor in light of the other kinds of labor involved in book production. Kirk Melnikoff highlights the relations between literary creation and the bookshop as he studies the resonances between Isabella Whitney's poems and other works sold by her printer and publisher. Sarah Wall-Randell addresses the sexist biases in authorship studies and asks whether it is reasonable to consider the Countess of Pembroke as the coauthor of the 1593 Arcadia, and Molly Yarn draws us into the nineteenth century through a discussion of Katherine Lee Bates, a poet and editor of student editions of Shakespeare's plays. The third section focuses on women whose labor involved reading, collecting, and marking books. Elizabeth Kolkovich argues that reading, writing, and patronage were all ways that elite women could make books, while Georgianna Ziegler and Lori Newcomb offer ways of detecting meaningful patterns within large sets of annotations and point out that women's reading was personal and social.
The collection is remarkably cohesive, and the reader benefits from the fact that core ideas (from Rebecca Olson, Maureen Bell, and Helen Smith) are discussed in several essays. The essays are of very high quality and the book is well illustrated. It will be useful to a wide range of scholars interested in the history of the book.
