The worldliness of print

This is a book about the worldliness of print in Britain from the final lapse of the Printing Act in 1695 to the thoroughgoing development of publishing as a specialist commercial undertaking and the industrialization of the book in 1830. The collective aim of the forty-nine contributors to this volume is ‘the intrusion of more history’ into the study of books and readers, copyrights and profits, censorship and advertising, technologies and trades – the manifold particulars that condition the pluriform ways in which meanings are made.

This is a book about the history of ‘the book’, a shorthand for any recorded text: catechisms and commodity price currents, encyclopaedias and children’s ABCs, manuscripts and mezzotints, serials and playbills. Just as ‘there cannot be a history of ideas without a history of objects’, so too is there no authentic history of objects without a dedicated effort to recover their makers. And if such a history does not attend to the ever-developing circumstances of production and distribution, to the fugitive testimonies of consumption, then how may it claim a degree of historical legitimacy? Produced and distributed by networks of workers from authors to hawkers, ‘the book’ – and the concomitant cultures forged by its consumers — proved a powerful agent for the construction of communities and corporate identities. Nor was this constitutive power of print limited to the literate: many unlettered persons could listen to a single reader.

Despite the discouragements women writers faced in early modern England, female authors and translators were surprisingly visible in the early print market. In most years from 1545 on, a buyer at a London bookseller's stall would have found one or more publications attributed to a woman. If first-edition, singly authored, literary publications proved scarce, as they sometimes did, the bookseller could have pointed the buyer to popular reprints of women's devotional and didactic works or to the many smaller contributions of women: Queen Elizabeth's prayers tucked into any of two dozen editions of Thomas Sorocold's Supplications of Saints, Margaret Ascham's prefatory epistle to her late husband's Scholemaster, or one of several poems in verse miscellanies attributed to anonymous women. The numbers of women authors in print do not come close to those of male authors, but women were conspicuous enough in early print to make female authorship a relatively familiar, even conventional, phenomenon. Works by and including women authors looked much like the other items for sale at the bookseller's stall, if not like the folios of the most ambitious and prolific men, then at least like the publications of the majority of male authors. Women's publications were reprinted only slightly less often than those by minor male authors. Shorter compositions by both men and women were often used by printers to supplement more substantial primary texts. Women were frequently identified with initials or class titles, and this practice was common for male authors, too.

'The time is coming', wrote Mary Cary in 1651, when 'not onely men, but women shall prophesie; not onely aged men, but young men; not onely superiours but inferiours; not only those that have University-learning, but those that have it not; even servants and handmaids.' Cary is prophesying about prophecy itself, her words' sense of urgency suggesting the peculiar pertinence of this discourse to the turbulent mid seventeenth century. Prophecy was a mode of utterance that both testified and contributed to the revolutionary changes of those years. Cary invokes it as a form of address which would sweep away all the usual social strictures regarding who was authorized to speak on matters of public importance: all would prophesy, including those habitually excluded from authoritative public discourse - women, young men, inferiors, the uneducated, 'even servants and handmaids'. Cary was a Fifth Monarchist, and so part of a millenarian group actively preparing for the imminent return of King Jesus, but her radical religious politics alone do not account for her enthusiastic anticipation of the revival of prophecy. John Milton had likewise declared that 'now the time seems come, wherein . . . all the Lords people are become Prophets'. Milton, close to the heart of revolutionary power, and Cary, a more marginal figure, both understood prophecy to be a timely and vital force in the service of God.

Often cited as the most democratic of genres, autobiography in the early modern period crosses the divides of class, religion and political persuasion. At one end of the social spectrum are the autobiographies of Viscountess Elizabeth Mordaunt and Lady Anne Halkett. At the other may be found autobiographies written by women of the servant and labouring classes, such as Barbara Blaugdone, Barbara Scaife and Anne Herring. In terms of spiritual allegiance, distinctive are Catholic writers such as Lady Lucy Knatchbull and Elizabeth Cellier; arresting too, however, are those Protestant writers who span all possible shades of Nonconformity. Politically, autobiographers frequently appear at several removes from one another, a fact which is graphically illustrated in the instances of Lucy Hutchinson and Margaret Cavendish, who chronicle local or national happenings in addition to their own spiritual and material concerns. The range of women writing is matched by the spectrum of forms in which they wrote. As the anthology Her Own Life (the first point of departure for readers investigating the field) made clear, women in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries signalled selves across a variety of literary and non-literary genres. The term 'autobiography', then, can be applied to an important body of women's literary and cultural materials which ranges from diary to memoir and from conversion narrative to prophetic statement. This chapter addresses the multiple ways in which early modern women were able to write autobiographically and reflects upon the means whereby the early modern female 'I' might be read with critical currency.

'It is impossible to say when women began to write fiction', Elaine Showalter mused in 1977, then proposed that a novelistic 'literature of their own' could be traced 'from about 1750 on'. Even as Showalter cautioned against generalizing from the 'covert solidarity' of Victorian women novelists to a long feminine literary tradition, she assumed that women's fiction writing must have begun with the novel. Since 1977, the recovery of early modern women writers has led us all to rewrite our literary histories, but prose fiction still remains the genre of early modern writing in which women's share seems most surprisingly sparse. I would like to recover a fuller sense of early women's participation in fiction writing by offering generous definitions of every term in Showalter's early comment. As recent work has shown, we now count as women writers those who pen in manuscript or anonymously or collaboratively, as well as those who publish in their own names. Writing now includes translation, continuation and imitation as well as original creation. We should also define fiction inclusively, since in this period before the novel coalesced as a genre, the variety of imaginative prose writing exceeded any extant generic vocabulary. These more comprehensive definitions embrace literary strategies and practices that were not unique to women-authored fiction, but were the conditions of production of all early modern fiction. Indeed, women-authored fiction, although statistically rare, was crucial in enlarging the scope of a genre the period considered marginal. Precisely because women had to approach writing fiction with double caution, both gendered and generic, they articulated unusually subtle claims for the artistic, ethical and political seriousness of imaginative prose.

In her manuscript miscellany, Ann Bowyer writes 'weomenkind ar man's woe', followed by 'o man wee weomen ar kind' (Bodleian Library MS Ashmole 51, fol. 4r). Directly beneath this is the rhyming couplet: 'Explod that S & giue yt women dew / Then you shall find our sentenc is most trew.' The large initials 'F:B' in the right margin could apply to both passages, raising several questions. Did a person (a family member?) with the initials F. B. write these lines, which Ann Bowyer later transcribed? Did the writer or scribe of these lines wish to engage playfully (or more seriously) with an anagram disparaging to women? Such lines demonstrate the potential interactive nature of manuscript compilation in the period, as readers and writers could transcribe, respond to and even alter what they chose to include in their own compilations. During the early modern period, much literary activity took place in handwritten form. One of the most valuable records we have of manuscript culture is the manuscript miscellany, each one a unique collection of writing culled from a number of sources. Often these miscellanies contained verse, sometimes identifiable as having been copied from printed sources, sometimes known to have circulated in some kind of manuscript transmission, sometimes unknown in any other versions. But these manuscript miscellanies can be difficult to characterize, since material in prose of all types (from sermons to personal records to material gleaned from historical sources) is also often found in their pages. Since the 1980s, the manuscript culture of the early modern period has become an important area of study. More recently, women's participation in this significant literary system has become an expanding field.