'Grossly Material Things': Women and Book Production in Early Modern England. By HELEN SMITH.

Abstract

The title of Helen Smith'sbook is a studiously defiant snub of Virginia Woolf's then-putative argument, made in her A Room of One's Own of 1928, that Renaissance women participated little, if at all, in the authorship and production of books. Smith's women-centred concern with the English book trade is lightly reflected in the jacket cover — a detail from Gabriel Metsu's An Old Woman with a Book — which portrays a woman handling a folio volume possessively, her eyes cagily looking at some object outside of the picture, as if disturbed from her study. Taking as its basis the structure of Robert Darnton's communications circuit (1982), the book outlines, in five chapters, the active role of women, who, often in collaboration with men, were authors, producers, disseminators, and readers of manuscript and print. In her section on female composition, Smith discusses the work of women as domestic amanuenses (such as Esther Inglis) and the role of women within the Protestant tradition's emphasis on the importance of the divine Word as ‘transmitted through devout bodies' (p. 28). Religion is also of importance in translation, for, as Smith details, post-Reformation nuns were involved in the trans lation of religious works; sometimes their names would be on the book's title-page while the author's was not, implying a form of transferred authority from (often male) author to (female) translator. Women's voices might be found in the genre of the ‘monstrous birth pamphlet’ (p. 49), in which midwives demonstrated their knowledge of birthing. Smith also highlights the importance of patronage in the production of printed texts. Stressing in particular the need for a definition of patronage to be ‘capacious' (p. 54) in order to accommodate for social networks and various aspects of interwoven discourses, Smith uses as case studies the patronage of women including Lucy Russell, Countess of Bedford, and Mary (Sidney) Herbert, in order to demonstrate their significant, if overlooked, role in patronage and print.