Introduction

Cultural discourses of women’s reading

Reading is intrinsically connected to the culture in which it takes place. Women’s reading habits (as well as men’s) were shaped by contemporary cultural beliefs and conventions. Cultural discourses surrounding proper gendered behaviour were present in many forms of early modern media, with representations of femininity present in art, literature and theatre.¹⁷ Instructional and conduct literature gave perhaps the clearest prescriptions for how men and women should behave, setting out guidelines for how to demonstrate qualities appropriate to one’s gender and class.¹⁸ Conduct texts aimed at a female readership became increasingly common as the seventeenth century progressed and women’s literacy rates rose.¹⁹ There were certain commonalities in the ideals of feminine behaviour, with emphasis often placed on women’s chastity, modesty and piety.²⁰

Conduct literature discussed women’s reading habits at length, but primarily focused on two main types of text: romantic fiction and religious or devotional texts.²¹ These represented the perceived dichotomy of female nature; being either transgressively sexual or deeply pious. Conduct literature gave women rules for behaviour that would reflect their inner ‘goodness’; reading was one of many habits that was either encouraged or warned against, depending on the book. The centrality of a book’s content was made clear in Jacques du Bosc’s The Excellent Woman, a French conduct book from the mid-seventeenth century that was translated into English and became very popular. In the preface to the book, having extolled the benefits and virtues of reading, du Bosc offered a note of caution:

since all Books are not excellent, and there are many which truly deserve to be brought to no light but by the fire; the printing of which should rather have been hindred than the reading them: It must be acknowledged that there is no less difficulty in choosing good Books to employ us when we are alone, than to choose good Wits for our entertainment in company. So that if any find they must not rely upon themselves in this matter for the making of a good choice, they ought at least to follow the counsel of the most knowing and most vertuous, for fear that in reading they may happen to infect the Mind or debauch the Conscience.²²

These fears about reading were based in a belief that reading was transformative and had a powerful effect on the individual. As Adrian Johns has shown, there was a common belief that ‘if one wished to retain reliability and independence of mind, then one must be careful of what, and how, one read’.²³ Johns gives many examples of early modern readers being harmed, sometimes irreparably, by reading, particularly reading done during childhood. Reading the wrong book (particularly romances) or reading in the wrong way could have deep and long-lasting physiological effects.²⁴ Johns describes the story of the natural philosopher Robert Boyle, who had been recommended romances as a boy to ease his melancholy. He tried to counter the influence of these books later in life, disciplining his thinking by reading algebra, but found that his mind often wandered and indulged in romantic imaginings. As Johns noted, ‘the effects of reading those romances had proved permanent, and Boyle simply had to live with them’.²⁵ Given the potential to cause damage, it is no wonder that writers of advice books were often preoccupied with reading.

This image of romances having almost addictive properties is present in many conduct books, stretching back to the influential and enduringly popular sixteenth-century work on female education by Juan Luis Vives.²⁶ Vives specifically included a chapter on what books should and should not be read, warning against romances and some Greek poetry. He wrote that a woman:

should avoid these books as she would a viper or a scorpion. And if a woman is so enthralled by the reading of these books that she will not put them down, they should not only be wrested from her hands, but if she shows unwillingness to peruse better books, her parents or friends should see to it that she read no books at all and become unaccustomed to the reading of literature.²⁷

The compulsion to read literature that Vives deemed unsuitable was so strong that he advised that no reading at all was better than reading the wrong material. There is also a clear element of community control here: a woman’s friends and family were tasked with checking her reading habits. There is no doubt an underlying implication that women were weak-willed, but as in the case of Robert Boyle, this did affect men as well – reading was potentially highly dangerous and had to be carefully controlled.

The direct opposite of romance reading, which could have a highly negative effect on the individual, was religious reading. Absorbing devotional texts improved a person’s mind and body (acting both spiritually and physiologically) and was an essential part of early modern piety. The dichotomy between religious and romance reading is perhaps made most clear in the ‘conversion narratives’ employed by several seventeenth-century conduct book writers, in which they imagine a youthful infatuation with romances being swept away by proper religious devotion once the reader had realised the error of their ways.²⁸ For example, Richard Allestree declared that once women found piety, the ‘devout temper of her mind will by a holy leger-demain shuffle the Romances out of her hand and substitute the Oracles of Truth; will not let her dream away her time in phantastic scenes, and elaborate nothing, but promt her to give all diligence to make her Calling and Election sure’.²⁹ Conversion, therefore, would quite literally push romances away with a ‘holy’ sleight of hand and substitute proper, devotional reading.

Richard Baxter also employed this conversion narrative in his funeral sermon for his wife, Margaret. He said of Margaret that:

In her vain youth, Pride, and Romances, and Company suitable thereto, did take her up … But in a little time she heard and understood what those better things were which she had thought must be attained … Whereupon she presently fell to self-judging, and to frequent prayer, and reading, and serious thoughts of her present state, and her salvation.³⁰

There is a clear suggestion here that reading romances translates into other bad behaviour: Margaret not only read the wrong books but she kept ‘company suitable thereto’. However, she was saved from her youthful folly and became a model of an ideal pious woman. In setting up this narrative Baxter and Allestree were showing that women could redeem themselves through practising proper behaviours – through praying regularly and reading religious texts.

There has been a tendency to stress that women’s reading was curtailed and limited by the culture in which they lived.³¹ Kevin Sharpe and Steven Zwicker have argued that ‘for most literate women the experience of the book was confined to spiritual genres and to household manuals, to books of housewifery, herbals, and cookery books’.³² However, not only does this drastically underestimate the wide literary tastes of women, and the ways in which reading in many forms was part of their daily lives, it also overlooks something that has been commonplace in studies of male reading habits in the early modern period. There has long been a recognition that reading was above all meant to be useful, that men undertook to read books that informed either their intellect, general knowledge or daily lives. As T. A. Birrell wrote,

the contents of the 17^th-century gentleman’s library was of course predominantly utilitarian: he bought the books he needed. As a landowner and magistrate he needed books on law. As a patron of church livings he needed books on theology … even the acquisition of literature, belles lettres, was partly utilitarian. It was justified as a mixture of the utile and the dulce.³³

Household manuals, cookery books and spiritual genres would have been essential to women’s daily lives – they were useful texts, and not necessarily evidence of limitation.

This focus on use has often been framed in terms of ‘active’ reading, which naturally invites the inverse of ‘passive’ reading. Active reading has been a mainstay of historical studies of reading habits ever since Lisa Jardine and Anthony Grafton’s influential study of Gabriel Harvey, the Elizabethan scholar.³⁴ Many studies of early modern marginalia have since taken this concept of active reading as the norm.³⁵ It has become a standard by which to measure the habits of all readers. This is not to lay the blame at the feet of Jardine and Grafton, who made the social boundaries of their work very clear, but suggesting that some reading is active implies that there is a passive form of reading as well. This has frequently been attached to women’s reading, or to genres that are usually associated with women. Romances, plays and other forms of fiction are often referred to as ‘light reading’.³⁶ There is an unspoken assumption that reading that elicits an emotional response cannot also be critical. However, as Frances Teague has pointed out, ‘some early modern readers found delight in books, but their pleasure was never frivolous enjoyment. Even when indulging in a romance, a woman was unlikely to read quickly or mindlessly’.³⁷ This is problematic itself, however, still aligning enjoyment with frivolity and an implied lack of intellectual rationality. As many feminist theorists have pointed out, Western epistemology positions rationality and emotion as binary opposites. Writers such as Alison Jaggar have challenged the concept of male rationality, arguing for a more feminist epistemology. Jaggar noted how ‘within western philosophical tradition, emotions usually have been considered as potentially or actually subversive of knowledge’.³⁸ She posits that emotions function as a way of actively engaging with or constructing the world, rather than uncontrollable impulses that are a passive response to events or objects around us. Thus, an emotional reaction can be just as ‘active’ as an intellectual one, allowing the reader to develop their understanding and knowledge of the world through their reading.

It is necessary therefore to move away from the active/passive binary when approaching early modern reading. Emotional responses to reading can have just as tangible an effect on the individual as intellectual ones, nor are they ‘passive’. ‘Activity’ has been imbued with certain assumptions and connotations that privilege specific types of activity, which has in turn led to a misinterpretation of many people’s reading experiences in the early modern period. Reading for spiritual nourishment or to strengthen social bonds was as important as for scholarly endeavour.

Finding women readers

The ‘woman reader’ was diverse. However, exploring all the multifaceted ways in which people, and specifically women, in the early modern period experienced reading would be outside the scope of this book.³⁹ I am focusing on a select group of women: those who tended to leave written traces of their reading, in the form of letters, diaries, notebooks or annotations. These women were from the upper ranks of society, demonstrated by their literacy and education levels, and their purchasing power. These categories were all central to their identities, and it is important to remember therefore that this book is only considering a certain type of femininity, one which was defined as much by class/wealth as by gender.

It is crucial to recognise how archives themselves have worked to perpetuate these categories. The nature of reading itself is one barrier to finding traces of it in the archive, and this is compounded when looking at the reading of marginalised groups.⁴⁰ The paucity of evidence for early modern women readers means that such a picture has to be built up from often fragmentary sources: a passing mention of reading or books in a letter or diary, as part of a list in an inventory or a scribbled name or comment in the margins. Finding these references can be challenging, involving extensive archival work and use of online and printed resources. Some of this can prove fruitless, but there is more evidence than is often assumed, if you know how and where to look for it.

There is, first and foremost, a great deal of serendipity involved in this process. Browsing through letters, online catalogues or printed contemporary texts can result in a day with no concrete findings, as is of course commonplace in historical research, but can also end with exciting results, or at least a mention here or there of reading. Primarily, my evidence has come from four main source bases: annotated books (often books inscribed with women’s names), commonplace books or other manuscript compilations, letter collections and women’s diaries, memoirs or similar autobiographical writings. All of these come with their own difficulties in terms of identification. The organisation of the historical record and its focus on ‘significant’ figures and events has often resulted in women’s records being subsumed and hidden. As Georgianna Ziegler has pointed out, ‘even if you look in the places where you would expect to find traces of [women], they have often remained invisible through omission’.⁴¹ At a time when new forms of recording and digitisation offer novel ways of presenting, sorting and analysing the historical record, it is important to reflect on the ways in which technologies enable and prevent research into early modern women.

One of the best and most tangible sources for reading are annotations and marginalia in books – they demonstrate (to varying degrees, depending on the note) a clear interaction with the book or text. There are some online resources for finding annotated books, although by and large these have prioritised male authors and annotators. The Annotated Books Online project is a resource for those interested in early modern reading habits, and involves the collaboration of a number of British, European and American libraries to digitise various annotated books in their collections.⁴² However, the majority of annotators have been early modern male intellectuals. The ‘highlights’ page lists annotators such as Martin Luther, Isaac Newton, Michel de Montaigne, Gabriel Harvey and Erasmus of Rotterdam. This is an extremely valuable resource, allowing remote access to the extensive annotations of figures like Harvey. However, it is partial at best, and searching for readers with names such as ‘Elizabeth’, ‘Anne’, ‘Mary’ or ‘Sarah’ currently produces no results.

The problem with online collections of this kind is that they are, in general, focused on figures who are the most well known and who fit into grand historical narratives, and this usually results in a largely male source base. This is, of course, due to a desire to make the databases appeal to a wide audience, but it is reflective of a larger issue within the study of history and literature that prioritises work according to a standard of scholarly engagement, often implicitly male, that would have been institutionally inaccessible to most of contemporary society.

The very fact of using annotations as a way into exploring reading contributes to the narrow subject base, as this form of engagement with text generally, for the early modern period, privileges male readers who were more likely to be able to write.⁴³ Ownership inscriptions are good indicators of women’s interaction with books, if not definitive evidence of reading. In order to find these inscriptions, searching rare book catalogues with the term ‘her book’ often proves fruitful. This can be combined with a common contemporary woman’s name to narrow results, although this does of course result in a tendency to focus on readers with certain names.⁴⁴ Using popular women’s names in conjunction with the term ‘commonplace book’ also reveals sources. Most online catalogues do not offer gender-specific searching, so using gendered terms or names is usually the best way to navigate results. The use of names, as an alternative to sex-specific searching, is no doubt useful, but it does come with its own methodological implications. Searching by name serves to individuate provenance, prioritising the individual over the collective category. The ‘woman reader’ therefore becomes a collection of readers named Elizabeth, Mary or Anne. Sex-specific searching would provide an alternative to this, allowing one to utilise the category of ‘woman’ or ‘man’ effectively in archival research, although this of course comes with its own methodological issues.

In recent years, however, there has been an effort to increase the visibility of women’s annotations, with social media playing an important role. Scholars on social media frequently share images of female ownership inscriptions in early modern books, using the hashtag #HerBook.⁴⁵ This can be a useful tool for sourcing and sharing instances of female autograph inscriptions which are often left out of catalogue copy notes. Moreover, there are now several websites dedicated to highlighting female book ownership. The blog ‘Early Modern Female Book Ownership’ provides an extremely useful repository of books signed by women, searchable by genre and century.⁴⁶ This has allowed women’s book ownership to be much more widely available, including books that may be housed in private collections or where the inscription is not included in the catalogue record. It has been invaluable for my own research. Similarly, the Clark Library has digitised over 250 of its rare books bearing manuscript annotations, creating a database that can be refined by genre, subject and decade, although this does not necessarily illuminate women’s inscription practices.⁴⁷

Some projects focus on specific individuals, such as Sarah Lindenbaum’s work on Frances Wolfreston, one of the seventeenth-century female book collectors best known to modern scholars.⁴⁸ Lindenbaum has been working on recovering more of Wolfreston’s books, adding to those identified by Paul Morgan in the 1980s, and Arnold Hunt, who added twenty-nine books to Morgan’s tally.⁴⁹ Over 230 of Wolfreston’s books have been identified, a marked increase from the 103 Morgan had found in 1989. Lindenbaum has a blog dedicated to Wolfreston and the reconstruction of her library, and she uses this to crowd-source books bearing Wolfreston’s distinctive mark.⁵⁰ This method of gathering evidence is particularly useful given the often fragmentary nature of sources for women’s reading, and the financial and geographical challenges one might face in visiting multiple archives on an international scale.⁵¹

In this book I will present a picture of women’s reading habits that would not be possible without the many resources that other scholars have painstakingly created. I want to highlight the breadth and depth of women’s reading habits. Each chapter of this book will consider a different type of reading and the associated reading experiences of women. Religion and romance, as the types of literature most often linked to women, will be discussed first, but I will also explore how women consumed more political and philosophical or scientific texts in Chapters 3 and 4. Finally, Chapter 5 will think more broadly about how women interacted with books beyond simply reading print; how they used books for multiple ends and how they might reread manuscript material as well as printed text. This will demonstrate the many and varied genres that women read, and the ways in which they read them, all of which helped to create a sense of identity.

The organising principle behind the book is types of reading and types of books. This maps very imperfectly onto literary genre, particularly when considering categories of knowledge such as ‘the news’ or philosophy and science, which were at best porous categories in the early modern period. ‘Genre’ itself is a relatively modern term; before the nineteenth century, terms such as ‘kinds’ or ‘species’ were instead used to classify literary texts.⁵² However, early modern thinkers were clearly concerned about the types of text that people were consuming and this concern was often influenced by a person’s gender, as is demonstrated by the preoccupation with ‘good’ or ‘bad’ books in conduct literature. This book is not about ‘genre’ per se, but about the different categories of knowledge and types of text that allowed women to advertise, negotiate and fashion different parts of their identities – be that in terms of their politics, intellectualism, relationships or religious belief.

Ultimately, I am considering the category of the ‘woman reader’ itself. While this figure is taken as a starting point for this book, it is important to remember the ways in which this category can be complicated, and move beyond a simple sex-based analysis. The developments and reading experiences outlined here should not stand for all women, but rather a group of wealthy, educated white women who were able to read and write. The reading habits of other sections of society, both men and women, were very different again, and there is not the space to explore that here. Gerald MacLean has argued that Frances Wolfreston’s reading indicates that she did not ‘see herself in any normative social roles prescribed for women … Wolfreston neither reads nor writes simply as a daughter, or a wife, or a mother, or an object of sexual fantasy’, but rather as a political and social agent.⁵³ These should not be seen as contradictory positions: women readers read as individuals, and were women. This book will pay attention to the gendered aspects of women’s identity, but also argue that the ways in which they read, and their reading materials, were formed and influenced by their social situation, politics and religion, as well as their gender.

Notes

1. 1.  A select few includes Heidi Brayman Hackel, Reading Material in Early Modern England: Print, Gender, and Literacy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Leah Knight, Micheline White and Elizabeth Sauer, ed., Women’s Bookscapes in Early Modern England: Reading, Ownership, Circulation (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2018); and Edith Snook, Women, Reading and the Cultural Politics of Early Modern England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005).

2. 2.  Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London: Routledge, 1990), 34.

3. 3.  See, for example, Kimberly Poitevin, ‘Inventing Whiteness: Cosmetics, Race, and Women in Early Modern England’, Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 11, no. 1 (2011): 59–89. I am grateful to Martine van Elk for initially raising this question of whiteness and reading.

4. 4.  Kate Flint, The Woman Reader 1837–1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 40–41.

5. 5.  Julie Crawford, Mediatrix: Women, Politics, and Literary Production in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 7.

6. 6.  There has been a great deal of valuable work on early modern women’s autobiography that has informed my approach here. Some selected works include Sharon Cadman Seelig, Autobiography and Gender in Early Modern Literature: Reading Women’s Lives, 1600–1680 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Henk Dragstra, Sheila Otway and Helen Wilcox, ed., Betraying Our Selves: Forms of Self-Representation in Early Modern English Texts (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000); Elspeth Graham, Hilary Hinds, Elaine Hobby and Helen Wilcox, ed., Her Own Life: Autobiographical Writings by Seventeenth-Century Englishwomen (London: Routledge, 1989); Julie A. Eckerle and Michelle M. Dowd, ed., Genre and Women’s Life Writing in Early Modern England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007); Hero Chalmers, ‘ “The Person I Am, Or What They Made Me to Be”: The Construction of the Feminine Subject in the Autobiographies of Mary Carleton’, in Women, Texts and Histories 1575–1760, ed. Clare Brant and Diane Purkiss (London: Routledge, 1992), 164–194; and Julie A. Eckerle, Romancing the Self in Early Modern Englishwomen’s Life Writing (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013).

7. 7.  Scholars such as Natalie Zemon Davis, Juliet Fleming and Jason Scott-Warren have explored this in relation to early modern inscription practices and gift-giving, marking out the pages of books as a space for expressing one’s sociable and relational identity. See Natalie Zemon Davis, ‘Beyond the Market: Books as Gifts in Sixteenth-Century France – The Prothero Lecture’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 33 (1983): 69–88; Juliet Fleming, Graffiti and the Writing Arts of Early Modern England (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001); Jason Scott-Warren, ‘Reading Graffiti in the Early Modern Book’, Huntington Library Quarterly 73, no. 3 (2010): 363–381. Similarly, scholars such as Julie Eckerle have examined how women used their reading of certain genres to align themselves with various characteristics and modes of behaviour – see Eckerle, Romancing the Self.

8. 8.  Some key work on women’s reading in the early modern period includes Suzanne Hull, Chaste, Silent, and Obedient: English Books for Women, 1475–1640 (San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, 1988); Brayman Hackel, Reading Material in Early Modern England; Heidi Brayman Hackel and Catherine E. Kelly, ed., Reading Women: Literacy, Authorship, and Culture in the Atlantic World, 1500–1800 (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008); Carol M. Meale and Julia Boffey, ‘Gentlewomen’s Reading’, in The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain. Volume 3: 1400–1557, ed. Lotte Hellinga and J. B. Trapp (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 526–540; Knight, White and Sauer, ed., Women’s Bookscapes in Early Modern England; Jacqueline Pearson, ‘Women Reading, Reading Women’, in Women and Literature in Britain, 1500–1700, ed. Helen Wilcox (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 80–99; Snook, Women, Reading and the Cultural Politics of Early Modern England.

9. 9.  Knight, White and Sauer, ed., Women’s Bookscapes in Early Modern England.

10. 10.  Brayman Hackel and Kelly, ed., Reading Women: Literacy, Authorship, and Culture in the Atlantic World, 1500–1800 (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008).

11. 11.  Heidi Brayman Hackel, ‘The Countess of Bridgewater’s London Library’, in Books and Readers in Early Modern England, ed. Jennifer Anderson and Elizabeth Sauer (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 138–159; Brayman Hackel, ‘Turning to Her “Best Companion[s]”: Lady Anne Clifford as Reader, Annotator and Book Collector’, in Lady Anne Clifford: Culture, Patronage and Gender in 17th-Century Britain, ed. Karen Hearn and Lyn Hulse (Leeds: Yorkshire Archaeological Society, 2009), 99–108; Mary Ellen Lamb, ‘The Agency of the Split Subject: Lady Anne Clifford and the Uses of Reading’, English Literary Renaissance 22 (1992): 347–368; Mary Ellen Lamb, ‘The Sociality of Margaret Hoby’s Reading Practices and the Representation of Reformation Interiority’, Critical Survey 12, no. 2 (2000): 17–32.

12. 12.  There has been a great deal of excellent work on reading habits in the early modern period taking this macro lens, although many of them often focus on or privilege male readers, or ignore the gendered aspect of reading. See, for example, Guglielmo Cavallo and Roger Chartier, ed., A History of Reading in the West, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999); Roger Chartier, The Order of Books: Readers, Authors and Libraries in Europe between the Fourteenth and the Eighteenth Centuries, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994); James Raven, Helen Small and Naomi Tadmor, ed., The Practice and Representation of Reading in England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Alberto Manguel, A History of Reading (London: Flamingo, 1997); and Robert Darnton, ‘First Steps towards a History of Reading’, Australian Journal of French Studies 23 (1986): 5–30. For general studies of reading in the early modern period, see Jennifer Anderson and Elizabeth Sauer, ed., Books and Readers in Early Modern England: Material Studies (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002); John N. King, ed., Tudor Books and Readers: Materiality and the Construction of Meaning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Eugene R. Kintgen, Reading in Tudor England (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1996); H. S. Bennett, English Books and Readers, 1475–1557: Being a Study in the History of the Book Trade from Caxton to the Incorporation of the Stationers’ Company (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1952); H. S. Bennett, English Books and Readers, 1558–1603: Being a Study in the History of the Book Trade in the Reign of Elizabeth I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965); H. S. Bennett, English Books and Readers, 1603–1640: Being a Study in the History of the Book Trade in the Reigns of James I and Charles I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970).

13. 13.  Brayman Hackel, Reading Material in Early Modern England.

14. 14.  Brayman Hackel, Reading Material in Early Modern England, 14.

15. 15.  Snook, Women, Reading, and the Cultural Politics of Early Modern England.

16. 16.  Lamb, ‘The Agency of the Split Subject’.

17. 17.  Jessica Murphy has done an extensive study of the representation of ‘virtuous women’, taking into account various genres of early modern literature and how they relate to the prescriptions for gendered behaviour set out in conduct books. See Jessica C. Murphy, Virtuous Necessity: Conduct Literature and the Making of the Virtuous Woman in Early Modern England (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2015). Also see Jacques Carré, ‘Communication et Rapports Sociaux dans les Traités de Savoir-Vivre Britanniques (XVIIe–XVIIIe siècle)’, in Pour une Histoire des Traités de Savoir-Vivre en Europe, ed. Alain Montandon (Clermont-Ferrand: Associations des Publications de la Faculté des Lettres et Sciences Humaines de Clermont-Ferrand, 1994), 269–300.

18. 18.  These texts were usually aimed at a middle- and upper-class audience, inculcating the values of polite society. See Robert Shoemaker, Gender in English Society, 1650–1850: The Emergence of Separate Spheres? (London: Longman, 1998), 22.

19. 19.  Shoemaker, Gender in English Society, 1650–1850, 22.

20. 20.  Shoemaker, Gender in English Society, 1650–1850, 23.

21. 21.  Sasha Roberts has discussed the ‘restricted range of texts’ with which women were identified in the seventeenth century; see Sasha Roberts, ‘Reading in Early Modern England: Contexts and Problems’, Critical Survey 12, no. 2 (2000): 3.

22. 22.  Jacques du Bosc, The Excellent Woman Described by Her True Characters and Their Opposites (London: Printed for Joseph Watts, [1692]), 5–6. Huntington Library, RB 344780.

23. 23.  Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 382.

24. 24.  Johns notes that this was not a gender-specific process; it ‘transcended place, time, sex, and social rank’ (Johns, The Nature of the Book, 383).

25. 25.  Johns, The Nature of the Book, 381.

26. 26.  Nine English editions of Vives’ text had been published by 1600, and the book maintained its popularity for decades. See Ursula Potter, ‘Elizabeth Drama and The Instruction of a Christian Woman by Juan Luis Vives’, in What Nature Does Not Teach: Didactic Literature in the Medieval and Early Modern Periods, ed. Juanita Feros Ruys (Turnhout: Brepols Publishers, 2008), 263.

27. 27.  Juan Luis Vives, The Education of a Christian Woman: A Sixteenth-Century Manual, ed. and trans. Charles Fantazzi (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 78.

28. 28.  The conversion narrative was a common rhetorical tool in the Puritan literary tradition, used sporadically in the sixteenth century and reaching a height of popularity in the mid-seventeenth century. It was not only used in reference to women’s reading – men certainly recorded ‘conversions’ of their reading habits as well – but it was frequently used to depict the frivolity of girlhood versus the (hopeful) piety of women. See D. Bruce Hindmarsh, The Evangelical Conversion Narrative: Spiritual Autobiography in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Kathleen Lynch, Protestant Autobiography in the Seventeenth-Century Anglophone World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); Abigail Shinn, Conversion Narratives in Early Modern England: Tables of Turning (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018).

29. 29.  Richard Allestree, The Ladies Calling. In Two Parts. By the Author of the Whole Duty of Man, The Causes of the Decay of Christian Piety, and the Gentlemans Calling (Oxford: Printed at the Theater, 1673), 115.

30. 30.  Richard Baxter, A Breviate of the Life of Margaret, The Daughter of Francis Charlton, of Apply in Shropshire, Esq; And Wife of Richard Baxter (London: Printed for B. Simmons, 1681), 4.

31. 31.  Mary Ellen Lamb, for example, has argued that portrayals or constructions of women readers in contemporary culture often restricted women’s access to certain genres. See Mary Ellen Lamb, ‘Constructions of Women Readers’, in Teaching Tudor and Stuart Women Writers, ed. Susanne Woods and Margaret P. Hannay (New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 2000), 23–34.

32. 32.  Kevin Sharpe and Steven N. Zwicker, ‘Introduction: Discovering the Renaissance Reader’, in Reading, Society and Politics in Early Modern England, ed. Kevin Sharpe and Steven N. Zwicker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 13.

33. 33.  T. A. Birrell, ‘Reading as a Pastime: The Place of Light Literature in Some Gentlemen’s Libraries of the 17th Century’, in Property of a Gentleman: The Formation, Organisation and Dispersal of the Private Library 1620–1920, ed. Robin Myers and Michael Harris (Winchester: St Paul’s Bibliographies, 1991), 114.

34. 34.  Lisa Jardine and Anthony Grafton, ‘ “Studied for Action”: How Gabriel Harvey Read His Livy’, Past & Present 129 (1990): 30–78.

35. 35.  The relevance of marginalia to both reading and writing studies has been explored in a recent edited collection, which considers annotations in the context of materiality (specifically the history of the book), identity and reading. See Katherine Acheson, ed., Early Modern English Marginalia (Abingdon: Routledge, 2019).

36. 36.  Birrell, ‘Reading as a Pastime’, 123.

37. 37.  Frances Teague, ‘Judith Shakespeare Reading’, Shakespeare Quarterly 47, no. 4 (1996): 366.

38. 38.  Alison M. Jaggar, ‘Love and Knowledge: Emotion in Feminist Epistemology’, in Gender/Body/Knowledge: Feminist Reconstructions of Being and Knowing, ed. Alison M. Jaggar and Susan Bordo (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1990), 145.

39. 39.  For work on reading lower down the social scale, see, for example, Margaret Spufford, Small Books and Pleasant Histories: Popular Fiction and Its Readership in Seventeenth-Century England (London: Methuen & Co., 1981) and Adam Fox, Oral and Literate Culture in England, 1500–1700 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).

40. 40.  It has long been recognised that archives are, in the words of Rodney Carter, ‘spaces of power’. Rodney G. S. Carter, ‘Of Things Said and Unsaid: Power, Archival Silences, and Power in Silence’, Archivaria 61 (2006): 216. There has been a great deal of recent work on the ‘silence’ of the archives, a term used to signify the gaps in what is recorded and made available to archive users. See, for example, David Thomas, Simon Fowler and Valerie Johnson, The Silence of the Archive (London: Facet Publishing, 2017); Marlene Manoff, ‘Mapping Archival Silence: Technology and the Historical Record’, in Engaging with Records and Archives: Histories and Theories, ed. Fiorella Foscarini, Heather MacNeil, Bonnie Mac and Gillian Oliver (London: Facet Publishing, 2016), 63–82; Antoinette Burton, Dwelling in the Archive: Women Writing House, Home, and History in Late Colonial India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); Marisa J. Fuentes, Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016); Kirsty Reid and Fiona Paisley, ed., Sources and Methods in Histories of Colonialism: Approaching the Imperial Archive (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017); Renée Romkins and Antia Wiersma, ed., Gender and Archiving: Past, Present, Future (Amsterdam: Verloren, 2017); and Randall C. Jimerson, Archives Power: Memory, Accountability, and Social Justice (Chicago, IL: Society of American Archivists, 2009).

41. 41.  Georgianna Ziegler, ‘Lost in the Archives? Searching for Records of Early Modern Women’, in Teaching Tudor and Stuart Women Writers, ed. Susanne Woods and Margaret P. Hannay (New York: The Modern Language Association, 2000), 316.

42. 42.  Annotated Books Online: A Digital Archive of Early Modern Books, accessed June 23, 2023, www.annotatedbooksonline.com.

43. 43.  Keith Thomas, ‘The Meaning of Literacy in Early Modern England’, in The Written Word: Literacy in Transition, ed. Gerd Baumann (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), 103. Thomas posits a complex and nuanced view of literacy, arguing for different levels of literacy. In his model, literacy could be split into the ability to read simple print (in which he also makes a distinction between reading black-letter and roman type); reading manuscript text and the ability to write; and being able to read and write in Latin and Greek, which tended to be the preserve of the (male) intellectual elite. Men were far more likely to attain the higher levels of literacy, and therefore more likely to be able to write extensive notes on their books – women may have owned and been able to read books, but did not necessarily have the ability to write more than their name. For more on literacy, see David Cressy, Literacy and the Social Order: Reading and Writing in Tudor and Stuart England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980). Anne Laurence has suggested that by the 1720s, 25 per cent of women were fully literate, meaning they could both read and write – see Anne Laurence, Women in England 1500–1760: A Social History (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994), 166. For more recent work on literacy, see Mark Hailwood, ‘Rethinking Literacy in Rural England, 1550–1700’, Past & Present 260, no. 1 (2023): 38–70.

44. 44.  I am very grateful to Georgianna Ziegler for suggesting this method of searching the Folger’s archives, and her guidance on approaching finding women in their collections.

45. 45.  ‘#HerBook’, Twitter, accessed June 23, 2023, https://twitter.com/search?q=%23herbook&src=typed_query. For more examples of scholars’ use of X, see Sjoerd Levelt, ‘Early Modern Marginalia and #earlymoderntwitter’, in Early Modern English Marginalia, ed. Katherine Acheson (Abingdon: Routledge, 2019), 234–256. The phrase ‘her book’ has garnered increasing attention in recent years, as studies of women’s book ownership and reading grow. The Rare Book Working Group at Princeton University Library ran a workshop on the topic of ‘her book’ in October 2018, examining ownership inscriptions in the library’s holdings. See Eric White, ‘Rare Book Working Group Examines “Her Book”’, Notabilia, October 29, 2018, accessed June 23, 2023, https://blogs.princeton.edu/notabilia/2018/10/29/rare-book-working-group-examines-her-book.

46. 46.  Early Modern Female Book Ownership: #HerBook, accessed June 23, 2023, https://earlymodernfemalebookownership.wordpress.com. Similarly, the Early Modern Women’s Marginalia blog is an extremely useful repository – Early Modern Women’s Marginalia, accessed August 12, 2024, https://earlymodernwomensmarginalia.cems.anu.edu.au.

47. 47.  ‘Early Modern Annotated Books from UCLA’s Clark Library’, Calisphere: University of California, accessed June 23, 2023, https://calisphere.org/collections/26771.

48. 48.  There has been a great deal of excellent work on Frances Wolfreston in recent years. See, for example, Sarah Lindenbaum, ‘Memorializing the Everyday: The Evidence of the Final Decade of Frances Wolfreston’s Life’, The Seventeenth Century 37, no. 3 (2022): 449–476 and Lori Humphrey Newcomb, ‘Frances Wolfreston’s Annotations as Labours of Love’, in Women’s Labour and the History of the Book in Early Modern England, ed. Valerie Wayne (London: The Arden Shakespeare, 2020), 243–266.

49. 49.  Paul Morgan, ‘Frances Wolfreston and “Hor Bouks”: A Seventeenth-Century Woman Book Collector’, The Library 6th Series 11, no. 3 (1989): 197–219; Arnold Hunt, ‘Libraries in the Archives: Researching Provenance in the British Library’, in Libraries within the Library: The Origins of the British Library’s Printed Collections, ed. Giles Mandelbrote and Barry Taylor (London: The British Library, 2009), 363–384.

50. 50.  Sarah Lindenbaum, ‘About’, Frances Wolfreston Hor Bouks, December 2, 2018, accessed June 23, 2023, https://franceswolfrestonhorbouks.com.

51. 51.  Lindenbaum has detailed her findings in her recent book chapter; see Sarah Lindenbaum, ‘Hiding in Plain Sight: How Electronic Records Can Lead Us to Early Modern Women Readers’, in Knight, White and Sauer, ed., Women’s Bookscapes in Early Modern England, 193–213.

52. 52.  Ralph Cohen, ‘History and Genre’, in Genre Theory and Historical Change: Theoretical Essays of Ralph Cohen, ed. John L. Rowlett (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2017), 85.

53. 53.  Gerald MacLean, ‘Literacy, Class, and Gender in Restoration England’, Text 7 (1994): 309.