In A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf described fictions as 'grossly material things', rooted in their physical and economic contexts. This book takes Woolf's brief hint as its starting point, asking who made the books of the English Renaissance, and what the material circumstances were in which they did so. It charts a new history of making and use, recovering the ways in which women shaped and altered the books of this crucial period, as co-authors,
editors, translators, patrons, printers, booksellers, and readers. Drawing on evidence from a wide range of sources, including court records, letters, diaries, medical texts, and the books
themselves, 'Grossly Material Things' moves between the realms of manuscript and print, and tells the stories of literary, political, and religious texts from broadside ballads to plays, monstrous birth pamphlets to editions of the Bible. In uncovering the neglected history of women's textual labours, and the places and spaces in which women went about the business of making, Helen Smith offers a new perspective on the history of books and reading. Where Woolf believed that
Shakespeare's sister, had she existed, would have had no opportunity to pursue a literary career, 'Grossly Material Things' paints a compelling picture of Judith Shakespeare's varied job prospects, and promises to
reshape our understanding of gendered authorship in the English Renaissance.
In A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf described fictions as 'grossly material things', rooted in their physical and economic contexts. This book takes Woolf's brief hint as its starting point, asking who made the books of the English Renaissance, and what the material circumstances were in which they did so. It charts a new history of making and use, recovering the ways in which women shaped and altered the books of this crucial period, as co-authors,
editors, translators, patrons, printers, booksellers, and readers. Drawing on evidence from a wide range of sources, including court records, letters, diaries, medical texts, and the books
themselves, 'Grossly Material Things' moves between the realms of manuscript and print, and tells the stories of literary, political, and religious texts from broadside ballads to plays, monstrous birth pamphlets to editions of the Bible. In uncovering the neglected history of women's textual labours, and the places and spaces in which women went about the business of making, Helen Smith offers a new perspective on the history of books and reading. Where Woolf believed that
Shakespeare's sister, had she existed, would have had no opportunity to pursue a literary career, 'Grossly Material Things' paints a compelling picture of Judith Shakespeare's varied job prospects, and promises to
reshape our understanding of gendered authorship in the English Renaissance.
List of abbreviations
List of illustrations
Acknowledgments
Note to the reader
Introduction: 'Grossly Material Things'
1: 'Pen'd with double art': Women at the Scene of Writing
2: 'A dame, an owner, a defendresse': Women, Patronage, and
Print
3: 'A free Stationers wife of this companye': Women and the
Stationers
4: 'Certaine women brokers and peddlers': Beyond the London Book
Trades
5: 'No deformitie can abide before the sunne': Imagining Early
Modern Women's Reading
Bibliography of Works Cited
Index
Helen Smith is Lecturer in Renaissance Literature at the University of York. She has published widely on the history of books and reading, and is co-editor (with Louise Wilson) of Renaissance Paratexts (Cambridge, 2011). She is Co-Investigator on the AHRC-funded project, 'Conversion Narratives in Early Modern Europe'.
Smith has produced a study that argues convincingly for the
integral engagement of women with the materiality of the printed
text. The strength of this work comes from the wealth of
illustrative examples placed within a convincing discussion of the
many facets affecting the production and use of early modern
books.
*Jessica Malay, Women's History Review*
Far from mere handmaids to their more accomplished male
contemporaries, the early modern women who people this
extraordinary book are revealed not only as patrons, printers, and
translators of male-authored works, but also as stationers,
chapwomen, and active readers who shape those works' very meanings.
A welcome corrective to the familiar emphasis on prescriptive
literature, Smith's work immerses us in the dirty, noisy world of
early modern England where men and women jostled for position in
the burgeoning economy of London and beyond.
*Christina Luckyj, Early Theatre*
brings a wealth of new insights to the field of book history
*Alice Eardley, Journal of the Northern Renaissance*
Smith's emphasis on materiality certainly alerts us to some
tantalizing glimpses of the place of women in both printing houses
and Stationers' Hall.
*Maureen Bell, Times Literary Supplement*
Smith presents a meticulous study of the participation of women in
all aspects of book production ... the volume may prove useful to
anyone researching the social, economic, and intellectual
composition of the book trade.
*N.C. Aldred, The Library*
Helen Smith's fascinating Grossly Material Things opens an
important window onto the basic circumstances of the Renaissance
printing house and sheds new light on the significant roles women
played in early modern Englands print marketplace ... Combining
elegant writing with an abundance of useful details, Smith's study
demands that we pay greater attention to the colophons of our
favorite Renaissance books ... When others explore the role of
women in the production of books in other markets, those scholars
would do well to take Helen Smith's book as a model.
*Andrew Fleck, Renaissance Quarterly*
Helen Smith's Grossly Material Things is a fascinating, insightful,
superbly researched book on the contributions women made to
manuscript and book production in the Early Modern period. Anyone
interested in the history of reading or of the book will learn a
great deal from her investigation ... The great strength of her
work is to refocus our attention on the web of gendered relations
in writing, translating, patronizing, publishing and reading in
this period.
*Tom Rooney, Early Modern Literary Studies*
Smith prods scholars to widen their definitions of textual labor to
include books' physicality - an unexamined aspect of their cultural
and intellectual impact.
*Kathryn Narramore, Textual Cultures: Texts, Contexts,
Interpretation*
This ambitious, well-researched, and timely study sets out to
revise our understanding not only of early modern women's roles in
book production (as its subtitle promises) but also of their myriad
contributions to the entire communications circuit, including the
commissioning, manufacture, distribution, and consumption of print
publications in England, and between England and the Continent ...
it will be of interest to a wide array of readers including, but
not limited to, specialists in book history.
*Natasha Korda, Joural of British Studies*
This monograph will be indispensable for early modern book
historians as well as scholars of women's writing in the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries.
*Gillian Wright, SHARP News*
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