Women's bookscapes in early modern Britain : reading, ownership, circulation / edited by Leah Knight, Micheline White, and Elizabeth Sauer.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Horace Howard Furness Memorial Fund.

Knight, Leah, 1976- editor.

White, Micheline, editor.

Sauer, Elizabeth, 1964- editor.

Horace Howard Furness Memorial Library (University of Pennsylvania)

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Great Britain.

Women--Books and reading--Great Britain--History--16th century.

Women.

Women--Books and reading--Great Britain--History--17th century.

Women and literature--Great Britain--History--16th century.

Women and literature.

Women and literature--Great Britain--History--17th century.

Literature and society--Great Britain--History--16th century.

Literature and society.

Literature and society--Great Britain--History--17th century.

Books and reading--Social aspects--Great Britain--History.

Books and reading.

Books and reading--Social aspects.

Women--Books and reading.

Genre:

History.

Physical Description:

viii, 304 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Ann Arbor [Michigan] : University of Michigan Press, 2018.

Summary:

"Women in 16th- and 17th-century Britain read, annotated, circulated, inventoried, cherished, criticized, prescribed, and proscribed books in various historically distinctive ways. Yet, unlike that of their male counterparts, the study of women's reading practices and book ownership has been an elusive and largely overlooked field. In thirteen probing essays, Women's Bookscapes in Early Modern Britain brings together the work of internationally renowned scholars investigating key questions about early modern British women's figurative, material, and cultural relationships with books. What constitutes evidence of women's readerly engagement? How did women use books to achieve personal, political, religious, literary, economic, social, familial, or communal goals? How does new evidence of women's libraries and book usage challenge received ideas about gender in relation to knowledge, education, confessional affiliations, family ties, and sociability? How do digital tools offer new possibilities for the recovery of information on early modern women readers? The volume's three-part structure highlights case studies of individual readers and their libraries; analyses of readers and readership in the context of their interpretive communities; and new types of scholarly evidence--lists of confiscated books and convent rules, for example--as well as new methodologies and technologies for ongoing research. These essays dismantle binaries of private and public; reading and writing; female and male literary engagement and production; and ownership and authorship. Interdisciplinary, timely, cohesive, and concise, this collection's fresh, revisionary approaches represent substantial contributions to scholarship in early modern material culture; book history and print culture; women's literary and cultural history; library studies; and reading and collecting practices more generally"-- Provided by publisher.

"Women in 16th- and 17th-century Britain read, annotated, circulated, inventoried, cherished, criticized, prescribed, and proscribed books in various historically distinctive ways. Yet, unlike that of their male counterparts, the study of women's reading practices and book ownership has been an elusive and largely overlooked field. In thirteen probing essays, Women's Bookscapes brings together the work of internationally renowned scholars investigating key questions about early modern British women's figurative, material, and cultural relationships with books. What constitutes evidence of women's readerly engagement? How did women use books to achieve personal, political, religious, literary, economic, social, familial, or communal goals? How does new evidence of women's libraries and book usage challenge received ideas about gender in relation to knowledge, education, confessional affiliations, family ties, and sociability? How do digital tools offer new possibilities for the recovery of information on early modern women readers? The volume's three-part structure highlights case studies of individual readers and their libraries; analyses of readers and readership in the context of their interpretive communities; and new types of scholarly evidence--lists of confiscated books and convent rules, for example--as well as new methodologies and technologies for ongoing research in the field. These essays dismantle binaries of private and public; reading and writing; female and male literary engagement and production; and ownership and authorship"-- Provided by publisher.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Local Notes:

Acquired for the Penn Libraries with assistance from the Horace Howard Furness Memorial Fund.

Other Format:

Online version: Women's bookscapes in early modern Britain.

ISBN:

0472131095

9780472131099

9780472124435

0472124439

OCLC:

1037295127