Smith 2012 - Revision history

Wtrettien: /* 5. 'No deformitie can abide before the sunne': Imagining Early Modern Women's Reading */

2013-05-06T18:54:26Z

5. 'No deformitie can abide before the sunne': Imagining Early Modern Women's Reading

← Older revision		Revision as of 18:54, 6 May 2013
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	:"Each of the often-prescriptive accounts of women's reading described above depicts textual engagement as a process of bodily assimilation, whether the reader devours the text or imprints it on her memory." (205)		:"Each of the often-prescriptive accounts of women's reading described above depicts textual engagement as a process of bodily assimilation, whether the reader devours the text or imprints it on her memory." (205)

	:"Descriptions of reading women in the early modern period situate textual engagement within a broader ecology, and establish books as part of the sensible world which acts on the body even as it is acted upon. It is this transformative, psychophysiological impact that renders reading an urgently social concern, and makes it an object of sustained ~~scruity~~. The bodily regimens of reading and its imbrication with other forms fo social and spatial practice offer a challenge to contemporary conceptions of consumption as inherently passive. In early modern England, the process of assimilation was physical before it was mental: readin was converted into bodily substance 'as the bodily organs ~~convet~~ food into ~~lood~~, and thence into animal ~~teissue~~'. Readers' bodies were moulded and altered by the texts they read, even as corporeal experience affected the individuals capacity for reception. The act of reading came prior to the act of understanding or interpretation, yet the process of reading engaged the will as well as the senses, and women could choose which parts of what they read should be allowed beyond the ''sensus communis''. Early modern women, as recent studies of commonplace books and manuscript transmission suggest, appropriated and transformed their reading matter in a rich variety of ways. Part of that transformation was ~~pyhysical~~: even the least contestatory of readings could reform and recreate the woman reader in a process of corporeal assimilation that at once absorbed the book and transformed the body." (210-211)		:"Descriptions of reading women in the early modern period situate textual engagement within a broader ecology, and establish books as part of the sensible world which acts on the body even as it is acted upon. It is this transformative, psychophysiological impact that renders reading an urgently social concern, and makes it an object of sustained scrutiny. The bodily regimens of reading and its imbrication with other forms fo social and spatial practice offer a challenge to contemporary conceptions of consumption as inherently passive. In early modern England, the process of assimilation was physical before it was mental: readin was converted into bodily substance 'as the bodily organs convert food into blood, and thence into animal tissue'. Readers' bodies were moulded and altered by the texts they read, even as corporeal experience affected the individuals capacity for reception. The act of reading came prior to the act of understanding or interpretation, yet the process of reading engaged the will as well as the senses, and women could choose which parts of what they read should be allowed beyond the ''sensus communis''. Early modern women, as recent studies of commonplace books and manuscript transmission suggest, appropriated and transformed their reading matter in a rich variety of ways. Part of that transformation was physical: even the least contestatory of readings could reform and recreate the woman reader in a process of corporeal assimilation that at once absorbed the book and transformed the body." (210-211)

			== Epilogue: Books on the Body ==

			portrait of unknown Lady from the court of King Edward VI: http://www.1st-art-gallery.com/thumbnail/250600/1/Unknown-Lady-From-The-Court-Of-King-Edward-VI.jpg

			:"The elabborate decoration of some miniature bindings and girld covers locate the books in the sapce between reading text, symbolic object, and site of alternative literacies" (214-215)

			:"Women, like men, used books to build or reinforce social relationships, passing them to friends, potential patrons, or dependents, and enclosing them, alongside other gifts, with letters." (215)

			:"Attempting to tract the totality of books' voyages around the web that ties together, rags, wainscotting, spectacles, and paper with moments of creative desire and commission, acts of writing and production, and moments of consumption and use that are themselves productive, this book suggests that the work of production is distributed across networks of human actos, material goods, institutions, and environments in ways that complicate the division between subjects and objects, those who act and that which is acted upon." (216)

Wtrettien: /* 5. 'No deformitie can abide before the sunne': Imagining Early Modern Women's Reading */

2013-05-06T18:47:27Z

5. 'No deformitie can abide before the sunne': Imagining Early Modern Women's Reading

← Older revision		Revision as of 18:47, 6 May 2013
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	== 5. 'No deformitie can abide before the sunne': Imagining Early Modern Women's Reading ==		== 5. 'No deformitie can abide before the sunne': Imagining Early Modern Women's Reading ==

			:"The writings of Vives and other conduct-book authors have proved fertie ground for students of early modern women, who have discovered in them evidence that mechanisms of repression and a quasi-panoptical cultural scrutiny operated even within what we anachronistically tend to see as the private and individuated space of reading." (175)

			Margaret Hoby's reading; she embroiders while someone reads to her; Anne Clifford's husband wants her to read the Bible with someone

			housekeeping and voracious reading as Protestant housewifely activities (177)

			:"Though it is problematic to align early modern literate Englishwomen with a consuming 'public', or early print with modern newspapers or the broadcast media, studies of commonplace books and manuscript transmission suggest that women responded o their reading in a variety of ways, sometimes internalizing its injunctions, sometimes appropriating or altering texts to suit particular contexts or ends." (178)

			:"Reading, I argue, was understood to be a bodily and embodied practice: an act of consumption that was productive and reproductive in physical as well as intellectual terms." (179)

			Christopher Goodwin, ''The Maydens Dreme'' (1542); dreams of women whose clothing is both text and textile (179)

			Rainbowe's funeral sermon for Susanna Howard, notes that she sticks a pin in the margin of her bible (185)

			:"Although it sues the same tools as those employed by the male humanist reader, the technique of marking items that need further explication suggests a divide in the purposes of male an female 'noting': humanist men collected topics and ''sententiae'' to be deployed at a later date, while godly women marked materials for further, guided, interpretation and meditation." (186-7)

			:"the lack of remaining records is a result of the material intensity of women's reading practice, rather than of their reluctance to sully the text" (188)

			Elizabeth I's preface to her translation -- in it, "the force of a woman's reading is understood to remake the text in an elision of reading practice and material correction. the reading body works upon the text in a powerful, outwardly directed process." (191)

			Catholic reading, the raeder "is understood to grantthe text iconic significance, creating an image as a mode of meditation and remembering, whereas the Protestant reader imprints the text as a subject for further hermeneutic engagement." (194)

			:"Descriptions of women's reading generally privilege the Aristotelian heart over the Galenic mind." (195)

			link between reading and hearing (198)

			:"Rather than being a mode of passive consumption opposed to creative or productive work, as in the ''Life'' of Lady Falkland, oral transmission, in numerous ccounts, stimulates women's productivity." (199) -- e.g. Margaret Hoby

			Wroth, tapestries decorating Dalinea's castle; "Wtihtin Wroth's text, the Ovidian narrative is recreated in visual form." (200)

			''Endymion, Tellus banished to castle "there to remain and weave"; Corsites asks, "Shall she work stories or poetries?", "suggesting the possibility of historical or fictionall naratives created by the needle rather than the pen" (201)

			:"Each of the often-prescriptive accounts of women's reading described above depicts textual engagement as a process of bodily assimilation, whether the reader devours the text or imprints it on her memory." (205)

			:"Descriptions of reading women in the early modern period situate textual engagement within a broader ecology, and establish books as part of the sensible world which acts on the body even as it is acted upon. It is this transformative, psychophysiological impact that renders reading an urgently social concern, and makes it an object of sustained scruity. The bodily regimens of reading and its imbrication with other forms fo social and spatial practice offer a challenge to contemporary conceptions of consumption as inherently passive. In early modern England, the process of assimilation was physical before it was mental: readin was converted into bodily substance 'as the bodily organs convet food into lood, and thence into animal teissue'. Readers' bodies were moulded and altered by the texts they read, even as corporeal experience affected the individuals capacity for reception. The act of reading came prior to the act of understanding or interpretation, yet the process of reading engaged the will as well as the senses, and women could choose which parts of what they read should be allowed beyond the ''sensus communis''. Early modern women, as recent studies of commonplace books and manuscript transmission suggest, appropriated and transformed their reading matter in a rich variety of ways. Part of that transformation was pyhysical: even the least contestatory of readings could reform and recreate the woman reader in a process of corporeal assimilation that at once absorbed the book and transformed the body." (210-211)

Wtrettien: /* 4. 'Certaine women brokers and peddlers': Beyond the London Book Trades */

2013-05-06T17:54:49Z

4. 'Certaine women brokers and peddlers': Beyond the London Book Trades

@@ Line 154: / Line 154: @@
 :"An attention to women's work and to women's relations to the Stationers' Company, both as a corporate body and a particular place, disrupts the lines between aesthetic and productive labour, and reveals 'precisely what th canonical construct we have inherited occludes, namely women's material and cultural production'. Borth as the owners of printing and bookselling businesses, and as the undertakers of 'dyuers other things', women were present in the spaces of print production. The texts thus produced are in part made intelligible as the result of women's work. If 'there is no text apart from the physical support that offers it for reading (or hearing)', women's labour is one of the material subtexts of the books we have inherited, and should be read alongside those books as a provocation and a challenge to the work of interpretation.' (134)
 == 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 ==

Wtrettien: /* 3. 'A free Stationers wife of this companye': Women and the Stationers */

2013-05-06T17:33:39Z

3. 'A free Stationers wife of this companye': Women and the Stationers

@@ Line 127: / Line 127: @@
 /1636 stationers (5.4%) listed in STC index of printers and publishers are women (100); women listed only after husbands' deaths (102)
-;"Given the repeated attemtps of both the state and the Stationers' Company to restrict the number of master printers and presses, marriage to a master printers' widow was a desirable mechanism by which a printer might ascend from the ranks of apprentices and journeymen, and widows were 'highly sought-after commdities on the marriage market'." ... Since a woman abdicated her membership of the company and right to operate a printing business if she married out of the trade, marriages between print workers and printers' widows may have been mutually advantageous, allowing a woman to continue working, even as her new husband gained an elevated status and an expanded stock." (107)
+:"Given the repeated attemtps of both the state and the Stationers' Company to restrict the number of master printers and presses, marriage to a master printers' widow was a desirable mechanism by which a printer might ascend from the ranks of apprentices and journeymen, and widows were 'highly sought-after commdities on the marriage market'." ... Since a woman abdicated her membership of the company and right to operate a printing business if she married out of the trade, marriages between print workers and printers' widows may have been mutually advantageous, allowing a woman to continue working, even as her new husband gained an elevated status and an expanded stock." (107)
 == 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 ==

Wtrettien: /* 3. 'A free Stationers wife of this companye': Women and the Stationers */

2013-05-06T14:00:53Z

3. 'A free Stationers wife of this companye': Women and the Stationers

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 :"Though there is less evidence than some critics have claimed of women creating coherent literary programmes among favoured writers, there is more, and more diverse, evidence than has been acknowledged of women's commission of texts, and of their negotiation of the financial duties of a dedicatee. The patron-author dyad was only one of the possible forms [86] women's patronage could take in early modern England, and patronage was rooted in extended social, economic, religious, and political networks. Women's ongoing interest in, and association with, the trade in printed books challenges the narrative which sets a democratic, public, and (by implication) male, marketplace of print against an aristocratic, elite, manuscript-based and (by implication) female tradition of patronage." (86)
 == 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 ==

Wtrettien: /* 2. 'A dame, an owner, a defendresse': Women, Patronage, and Print */

2013-05-06T12:41:35Z

2. 'A dame, an owner, a defendresse': Women, Patronage, and Print

@@ Line 85: / Line 85: @@
 Wiliam Byrd, manuscript anthology titled "My Ladye Nevells Booke" for Elizabeth, wife of Sir Henry Neville, "a volume that today constitutes one of the most important collections of English Reniassance keyboard musi" (63)
-requested texts as translations -- "suggests the ideological and practical link between elite women and vernacular literacy in early modern England. In part this connection was established because of the perceivd need to provide English language texts for women whose education did not extend to foreign languages." (67)
+requested texts as translations -- "suggests the ideological and practical link between elite women and vernacular literacy in early modern England. In part this connection was established because of the perceievd need to provide English language texts for women whose education did not extend to foreign languages." (67)
-as commissioned translators, "women are precariously placeD: their 'imperious' commands appear as the stimulus for male writing, calling the manuscript text into being. Such activity could take place within an extended relationship of mutual reading and textual exchange, but could, on thother occasions, appear more opportunistic, with the woman's 'requests' providing a more convenient motive for textual production. Freuently, women's manuscript commissions appear as the first step in a longer process of publication and dissemination that ties together women's private reading, vernacular literacy, and the entry into print." (67)
+as commissioned translators, "women are precariously placed: their 'imperious' commands appear as the stimulus for male writing, calling the manuscript text into being. Such activity could take place within an extended relationship of mutual reading and textual exchange, but could, on other occasions, appear more opportunistic, with the woman's 'requests' providing a more convenient motive for textual production. Frequently, women's manuscript commissions appear as the first step in a longer process of publication and dissemination that ties together women's private reading, vernacular literacy, and the entry into print." (68)
 == 3. 'A free Stationers wife of this companye': Women and the Stationers ==

Wtrettien: /* 2. 'A dame, an owner, a defendresse': Women, Patronage, and Print */

2013-04-30T01:27:15Z

2. 'A dame, an owner, a defendresse': Women, Patronage, and Print

← Older revision		Revision as of 01:27, 30 April 2013
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	== 2. 'A dame, an owner, a defendresse': Women, Patronage, and Print ==		== 2. 'A dame, an owner, a defendresse': Women, Patronage, and Print ==

			Abraham Darcie, ''The Honour of ladies'' (1622), 6 copies at Lambeth Palace Library with blank spaces at the head of the epistles waiting for addition of dedicatees (56)

			Walter Baley, ''A Short Discourse of the Three Kindes of Peppers in Common Vse'' (1588), withp rinted dedication with gaps for appropriate rank, title an name of dedicatee to be presented as individualized New Years' gifts

			:"dedications can be at once sites of rhetorical play, peritextual structures designed to constrain and direct the reader, and elements of the complex system of patronage that drew together social, political, and religious, as well asl iterary, life." (57)

			:"This variety attests to the difficulty of placing the patron within the circuit of communications around which this book is structured: s/he may be the ideal reader whose imagined response informs composition; the commissioner who sets the initial parameters of a given text; an agent in the process of publication; a guide to other readers; an unwitting advertising tool; or some complex combination of those functions." (60)

			Wiliam Byrd, manuscript anthology titled "My Ladye Nevells Booke" for Elizabeth, wife of Sir Henry Neville, "a volume that today constitutes one of the most important collections of English Reniassance keyboard musi" (63)

			requested texts as translations -- "suggests the ideological and practical link between elite women and vernacular literacy in early modern England. In part this connection was established because of the perceivd need to provide English language texts for women whose education did not extend to foreign languages." (67)

			as commissioned translators, "women are precariously placeD: their 'imperious' commands appear as the stimulus for male writing, calling the manuscript text into being. Such activity could take place within an extended relationship of mutual reading and textual exchange, but could, on thother occasions, appear more opportunistic, with the woman's 'requests' providing a more convenient motive for textual production. Freuently, women's manuscript commissions appear as the first step in a longer process of publication and dissemination that ties together women's private reading, vernacular literacy, and the entry into print." (67)

	== 3. 'A free Stationers wife of this companye': Women and the Stationers ==		== 3. 'A free Stationers wife of this companye': Women and the Stationers ==

Wtrettien: /* 'Pen'd with double art': Women at the Scene of Writing */

2013-04-29T13:46:00Z

'Pen'd with double art': Women at the Scene of Writing

← Older revision		Revision as of 13:46, 29 April 2013
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	:"I want to suggest taht women's role in the processes of mourning, and in the estate management and accounting of their deceased husbands' affairs, created a close link between the hands that tidies the corpse and the hands that tidied the corpus." (43)		:"I want to suggest taht women's role in the processes of mourning, and in the estate management and accounting of their deceased husbands' affairs, created a close link between the hands that tidies the corpse and the hands that tidied the corpus." (43)

			Mary Sidney's 'To the Angel Spirit' -- "Her work is presented as secondary, part of the project of completion and apparelling thatm arks editorial endeavour, yet the language of coupling and doubleness insists upon the work's multivocality and mutuality." (47)

			oral testimony of the monstrous birth pamphlet (49)

			:"women were more often rpesent at the scene of writing and recounting than previous scholarship has acknowledged, and that they made important and varied contributions to a range of texxts. Thhe textual relationships i describe in this chapter test the descriptive utility of the term collaboration, usually assumed to describe 'a ''co-''laboring or working together'. Those involved in textual co-creation were sometimes temporally as well as geographically separate, engaged in activities traditionally assumed to be secondary or subsequent to the act of literary creation, or -- on occasion -- had little or no discernible impact upon the text." (52)

			:"these varied forms suggest the need to adopt a more flexible language to elaborate the dynamics of textual co-presence." (52(

	== 2. 'A dame, an owner, a defendresse': Women, Patronage, and Print ==		== 2. 'A dame, an owner, a defendresse': Women, Patronage, and Print ==

Wtrettien: /* 'Pen'd with double art': Women at the Scene of Writing */

2013-04-19T14:52:38Z

'Pen'd with double art': Women at the Scene of Writing

← Older revision		Revision as of 14:52, 19 April 2013
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	:"In accounts of women's translation we see a tension between two dynamics of publication: on ein which women's texts are ostensibly published without their permission in order to circumvent their modest refusals, another in which women's translation is crucial to texts' reproduction and circulation." (40)		:"In accounts of women's translation we see a tension between two dynamics of publication: on ein which women's texts are ostensibly published without their permission in order to circumvent their modest refusals, another in which women's translation is crucial to texts' reproduction and circulation." (40)

	Mrs Clement Edmondes, printed her husband's book 'Observations upon Caesars Commentaries'' (1600)		wives involved in bringing husband's manuscript to print
			* Mrs Clement Edmondes, printed her husband's book 'Observations upon Caesars Commentaries'' (1600)
			* Anne Austin, ''Haec Homo'' (1637) -- published his text as a "memorialization" to him

			:"editorial work can be aligned with the processes of grieving" (42)

			:"I want to suggest taht women's role in the processes of mourning, and in the estate management and accounting of their deceased husbands' affairs, created a close link between the hands that tidies the corpse and the hands that tidied the corpus." (43)

	== 2. 'A dame, an owner, a defendresse': Women, Patronage, and Print ==		== 2. 'A dame, an owner, a defendresse': Women, Patronage, and Print ==

Wtrettien: /* 1. 'Pen'd with double art': Women at the Scene of Writing */

2013-04-19T14:50:04Z

1. 'Pen'd with double art': Women at the Scene of Writing

← Older revision		Revision as of 14:50, 19 April 2013
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	:"The variety of sources I examine is testament to the inherent capaciousness of both book history, memorably described by Cyndia Susan Clegg as an 'undisciplined discipline', and the study of 'stuff' which, for Daniel Miller, 'trhrives as a rather undisciplined substitute for a discipline: inclusive, embracing, original'. It is my contention that such undisciplined inclusiveness offers a more accurate picture of the textual lives of the men, women, and books who occupy these pages, and who lived in a world in which hefty devotional controversies were printed on the same presses as household miscellanies, mortality bills, or dramatic texts; genealogies and financial records might be drafted next to coterie verse; and 'Venus and Adonis' was raed between encounters with letters and the Bible." (12)		:"The variety of sources I examine is testament to the inherent capaciousness of both book history, memorably described by Cyndia Susan Clegg as an 'undisciplined discipline', and the study of 'stuff' which, for Daniel Miller, 'trhrives as a rather undisciplined substitute for a discipline: inclusive, embracing, original'. It is my contention that such undisciplined inclusiveness offers a more accurate picture of the textual lives of the men, women, and books who occupy these pages, and who lived in a world in which hefty devotional controversies were printed on the same presses as household miscellanies, mortality bills, or dramatic texts; genealogies and financial records might be drafted next to coterie verse; and 'Venus and Adonis' was raed between encounters with letters and the Bible." (12)

	== 1. 'Pen'd with double art': Women at the Scene of Writing ==		== 'Pen'd with double art': Women at the Scene of Writing ==

	catalogues of learned women: Heywood's ''gunaikeion'' ); Brathwaite's ''Boulster lecture'' (1640); Elizabeth Weston's ''Parthenica'' (1608) (17)		catalogues of learned women: Heywood's ''gunaikeion'' ); Brathwaite's ''Boulster lecture'' (1640); Elizabeth Weston's ''Parthenica'' (1608) (17)
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	majority of women's translations were religious (32)		majority of women's translations were religious (32)

			in women's translations, it was often "the male correspondent who chose to publish, and to publicly ackowledge, a woman's translation" (36)

			Anne Locke, in preface says she compounded the "receipte" of Calvin, and presented it in an "Englishe box" (36)

			:"In accounts of women's translation we see a tension between two dynamics of publication: on ein which women's texts are ostensibly published without their permission in order to circumvent their modest refusals, another in which women's translation is crucial to texts' reproduction and circulation." (40)

			Mrs Clement Edmondes, printed her husband's book 'Observations upon Caesars Commentaries'' (1600)

	== 2. 'A dame, an owner, a defendresse': Women, Patronage, and Print ==		== 2. 'A dame, an owner, a defendresse': Women, Patronage, and Print ==