Smith 2012

Smith, Helen. 'Grossly Material Things': Women and Book Production in Early Modern England. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.

"the varied and often invisible roles of women in textual production, the processes of making and consumption, the ways in which print and manuscript cultures overlap, and the idea that books are 'grossly material things' which have a physical as well as intellectual impact upon makers and readers" (3)

"Where the traces of men's input and interference can be discovered in much early modern women's writing, so too can the traces of women's labour be recovered within the pages of texts that have previously been assigned to a masculine realm of imaginative expression and publication. As a result, the early modern book and its texts can be reconceptualized not as male- or female-authored but as the interface at which numerous agents coincide, in complex and varied ways." (4)

"My excavation of women's productive encounters with the world of the early modern book contributes to an understanding of book creation as collaborative and contingent, and insists that all texts, not simply those attributed to women were marked and mediated by numerous agents, rendering books more mobile and more complexly sexed than has been allowed. This understanding is further enriched if we recognize that creative action was distributed not only wacross networks of men and women but across the material and institutional environments in which they dwlet and which, in part, constitute the work of production and consumption, as I discuss below." (6)

"First and foremost, my book restores early modern women to their place in the communications circuit. Yet the particularities of women's work also reveal that Darnton's closed circuit, emanating from and returning to the author, does not fully capture the dislocations and contingencies of early modern book production, or the lively paths of dissemination, circulation, and exchange." (6-7)

"I remain attentive to the overlapping economies of manuscript and print, investigating the materiality of writing as well as the materiality of printing, but insisting that women are more present than has been assumed, even in books securely attributed to male authors." (7-8)

"revealing the early modern male-authored book as a web of commercial, intellectual, technological, and corporeal encounters, and recovering the importance of women's work to the processes of book-making" (9)

"Books, their makers, and users exist as actors in mutually constitutive networks, in which 'meaning', 'the social', or 'culture' are not overlaid on a bedrock of 'gross' matter but are narrated in the movements of their participants, who are 'simultaneously real, discursive, and social'." (9)

"we can instead conceive of fictions, broadly defined, as the woven artefacts of objects, persons, and processes, whose traces remain present on and in the pages before us. In such a view, the strands of the web are not simply dependent upon, bu are made of, interlinked economic, social, and corporeal relationships." (10)

"Bodies, then, are a product of the books they handle, and both books and bodies are produced by their environment, even as they work upon it." (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)

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