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)

1. '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)

Donne's 'A Velediction' "does serves as a reminder of the numerous endeavours of women as authors, competitors, helpmeets, participants in manuscript exchange, scribes, and editors. Women in the early modern period took on these and other roles in the preparation and composition of texts, each of which raises particular questions of expressive agency." (18)

"reconceptualizing women's work as co-creation may require us to recognize some of the ingrained heterosexist assumptions that situate certain textual interventions as secondary or derivative." (19)

"the tension between the desire to uncover the precise contributions of each agent and the possibility that co-authorship leads, in Masten's terms, to a 'dispersal of author/ity, rather than a simple doubling of i; to revise the old aphorism, two heads are different than one'." (21)

women as domestic amanuenses: Lady Margaret Hoby, 4 September 1601, mentions copying letters for Mr Hoby; Margaret Spitlehouse was a scrivener copyiing wills in Bury St Edmunds between 1582 and 1596 (24)

Esther Inglis (25)

Susanna Howard, Countess of Suffolk, wrote sermons from memory, as recounted in Edward Rainbowe's funeral sermon for her (26)

"The examples given thus far show women working within a Protestant tradition that emphasized the importance of the divine Word, transmitted through devout bodies and revealed in a variety of textual forms. On the other side of the confessional divide, the post-Reformation English convents established in France and the Low countries were important centres of scribal reproduction where women 'tried to maintain the devotional traditions of the medieval mystic writers'." (28)

"The texts produced in the convents form an important female literary tradition, geographically separate from, but imaginatively connected to, English religious and social life. copying was central to the maintenance and reproduction of Catholic devotional practice, and nuns engaged in contemplation in the process of copying out spiritual guides that then formed objects of meditation for others. where a Protestant copyist like Elizabeth Brooke sought to capture the transmitted voice of God, Catholic nuns saw textual reproduction as both a concrete contribution to besieged convents and their brother monasteries and an accretion of devotional practice." (28)

Convent of the Immaculate Conception in Ghent, the first Abbess, Lucy (Elizabeth) Knatchbull – “wrote spiritual meditations and exercises and copied out an inspirational tract by the Abbess of Elpidia in Saxony to be read by the sisters in her care”; commanded that her papers be burnt, but the remaining were compiled by Sir Tobie Matthew; emphasis on copying, patterns (29)

"Taken together, these women's scribal labours ask us to reconsider the secondary or mechanical nature of copying." (30)

"Even where it is presented as wholly faithful, copying is described as a physical and sometimes transformative activity. The copyist is a co-labourer with the author or the divine word, reproducing, but also experiencing, the formative force of the text. Women's scribal work testifies to the broader ramifications of female literacy and to urgent shared agendas, whilst relocating the practice of composition in the processes of inscription and mutual labour." (30)

translation not merely a mechanical exercise but "was understood as a skilled, and frequently a collaborative, venture, in which translator and author both worked to discover the full sense of the text" (32)

majority of women's translations were religious (32)