Abstract

This fascinating collection of essays, edited by Patricia Pender and Rosalind Smith, explores the material cultures of early modern women’s writing as a new way of examining production, transmission and reception. Materiality here is defined most explicitly in the first essay in the volume, not merely as the physical features of written forms, but also what might be described as the sociology of texts (p. 16), which looks beyond authorship to practices of editing, printing, consumption, reading and circulation. The book positions itself methodologically as influenced by the ‘material turn’ and by ‘historical work on women’s literary labour and the function of gender in textual production’ (p. 2). At its heart, however, is an engagement with Matt Cohen’s pioneering study, The Networked Wilderness: Communicating in Early New England (2009), in which he discusses new models of production and publication, and outlines what he terms the ‘publication event’. Instead of concentrating on a single act of publication, Cohen looks at what is described as the ‘choral’ or collaborative nature of texts within their historical and cultural contexts, and which placed importance on extra-textual and material elements. Such an approach was employed by Cohen to break down the barriers between Native American and European American textual production, but is used here by the editors of the volume as a way of unlocking the material conditions of women’s writing during the early modern period, allowing for a re-examination of ‘extra-authorial’ activities such as patronage, translation and textual afterlives. Cohen’s work thus acts as a theoretical core to the volume which runs through (and, in interesting ways, unites) many of the essays in the volume. The editors are to be congratulated for assembling such a tightly focused, conceptually vibrant and coherent volume.

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