Material Cultures of Early Modern Women's Writing

by Pender, Patricia; Smith, Rosalind

• ISBN13: 9781137342423
• ISBN10: 1137342420
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2014-11-24
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

This collection examines the diverse material cultures through which early modern women's writing was produced, transmitted, and received, focusing on the ways it was originally packaged and promoted, how it circulated in its contemporary contexts, and how it was read and received in its original publication and in later revisions and redactions. In doing so, Material Cultures of Early Modern Women's Writing offers an account of the ways in which cultural mediation shapes our interpretations of early modern women's texts. The collection draws upon recent concepts of publication as 'event' – multiple, choral and occurring across different modes and times – in order to expand our conception of who early modern women writers were, how they wrote and circulated their texts, and how the reception of their work over time determines who and what is read now. Collectively, the essays in this book challenge not only how we read, analyse and value early modern women's writing, but also our understanding of the production, transmission, and reception of early modern literature more broadly.

Author Biography

Patricia Pender is a Lecturer in English at the University of Newcastle, Australia. She is the author of Early Modern Women's Writing and the Rhetoric of Modesty (2012) and has published essays on Anne Askew, Mary Sidney, and Anne Bradstreet in journals such as Women's Writing, SEL and HLQ.

Rosalind Smith is Associate Professor in English at the University of Newcastle, Australia, and has published articles and books on early modern women's writing, including Sonnets and the English Woman Writer, 1560-1621 (2005). With Patricia Pender, she is co-coordinator of the Early Modern Women's Research Network and leads a large collaborative research project on the material cultures of early modern women's writing.

Table of Contents

List of illustrations
Acknowledgements
Introduction - Early Modern Women's Material Texts: Production, Transmission and Reception; Patricia Pender and Rosalind Smith
1. Women and the Materials of Writing; Helen Smith
2. Dispensing Quails, Mincemeat, Leaven: Katherine Parr's Patronage of the Paraphrases of Erasmus; Patricia Pender
3. 'Le pouvoir de faire dire': Marginalia in Mary Queen of Scots' Book of Hours; Rosalind Smith
4. Translation and Community in the Work of Elizabeth Cary; Deborah Uman
5. The 'great Queen of Lightninge flashes': the Transmission of Female-voiced Burlesque Poetry in the Early Seventeenth Century; Michelle O'Callaghan
6. 'Philo-Philippa' as Author-reader; Kate Lilley
7. Late Seventeenth-century Women Writers and the Penny Post: Early Social Media Forms and Access to Celebrity; Margaret J.M. Ezell
8. Henrietta's Version: Mary Wroth's Love's Victory in the Nineteenth Century; Paul Salzman
9. 'One of the finest Poems of that nature I ever read': Quantitative Methodologies and the Reception of Early Modern Women's Writing; Marie-Louise Coolahan
Bibliography
Index