The conclusion considers how women’s agency in the circulation of texts was related to their social, cultural and spiritual identities and to the communities to which they belonged. It shows how women’s agency in textual culture in Renaissance Italy has a great deal in common with that of women elsewhere in Europe.

Moving on to the production and the sale of books, the chapter first considers laywomen and nuns as scribes, showing how some convents became centres for the copying of manuscripts for their own use or sometimes for sale. It then studies the ways in which some laywomen were able to contribute to the running of their families’ printing and bookselling businesses, and it describes cases in which some religious orders promoted or even assisted in the printing of books.

The chapter focuses on the initial circulation of texts in written form. It asks how female authors promoted the publication of their own works in manuscript and print, showing how women copied these works or had them copied and how they gradually became more confident in entering the public world of print publication. It considers how women in the role of patrons promoted the circulation of manuscript and printed texts composed by others, mainly by men. It then shows to what extent and why women were chosen to play another kind of role in the print publication of texts, by acting as dedicatees for authors, editors and publishers.

This chapter looks at the last phase of the communications circuits, in which texts move from producers to readers or listeners. It studies the various means through which women of all social classes could encounter texts. It is most concerned with books as objects that women came to own, through gift-giving (especially in the case of Books of Hours), dowries and inheritance, by commissioning manuscripts, through purchases, and through borrowing from other members of their communities. It also considers the contexts in which women could hear texts performed in song or speech. The chapter ends with a case study of the acquisition of books by a prominent Renaissance consort, Isabella d’Este, Marchioness of Mantua.

In recent decades, book historians have become more aware of the social contexts in which books were made and used, and social and cultural historians have furthered the study of the lives and achievements of women during the Renaissance. This book aims to examine the interface between these two fields of study. It makes use of Robert Darnton’s communications circuit, envisaged for print culture, and develops it by applying the concept of the circulation of texts also to manuscript culture. These circuits provide the framework for the three chapters.

Reading—or at least the appearance of reading—is everywhere in To the Lighthouse. The essential power and multiform nature of the scene of reading are evident from the transformations played upon its first appearance in the text: Mrs Ramsay's reading a fairy tale to James. As Mr Ramsay strolls up and observes this tableau, he finds the image iconic and compelling; in short order, he moves over and stands in front of them, displaying his need of sympathy, jealous of the attention given to his son. James, in his turn, tries to use the book to divert the man it had just summoned: “By looking fixedly at the page, he hoped to make him move on; by pointing his finger at a word, he hoped to recall his mother's attention, which, he knew angrily, wavered instantly his father stopped” (37).

But the scene of reading has more power to attract than to repel. James’ stratagem fails, as he suspected it would; Mrs Ramsay ignores him to satisfy her husband's needs. The tropes used to depict this interaction are revealing: after listening to his wife's words of encouragement, Ramsay is described as being “filled with her words, as a child who drops off satisfied” (38). For Mrs Ramsay, this is a much more arduous task than anyone realizes: “the whole fabric fell in exhaustion upon itself, so that she had only strength enough to move her finger, in exquisite abandonment to exhaustion, along the page of Grimm's fairy story” (38).

And what is the story being read to James? It is a misogynistic fairy tale, “The Fisherman and his Wife,” which Jane Marcus has called a sexist parable of “woman's insatiable desire for power” (1987: 154). This odd choice of inner text has occasioned considerable speculation and contradictory responses in the critical literature; it is all the more curious since Woolf chose it to replace other, less offensive fairy tales (“The Three Dwarfs” and “The Three Bears”) in her earlier manuscript. Beth Rigel Daugherty views Mrs Ramsay as one who has been destroyed by the narratives of the patriarchy; her fate is that which Lily must struggle to avoid: “through her use of the fairy tale and the Angel of the house, Woolf shows the implication of patriarchal myths for women— they kill” (1991: 302).

In their fiction, Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf explore the effects of reading; both dramatise acts of reading that prove to be harmful or dangerous to the characters – usually women – who are the readers. Mansfield's ‘The Tiredness of Rosabel’ (1908) begins with an observed scene of reading as the protagonist sits beside a young woman her own age who is reading raptly. Rosabel cannot see the volume clearly; she does observe that ‘it was something about a hot, voluptuous night, a band playing, and a girl with lovely, white shoulders’ (CW1, p. 133). The book, Anna Lombard, is a middle-brow novel that centres on an illicit and unconventional love triangle in India that concludes with a preposterous though ‘moral’ ending. The edition is a cheap paperback whose pages have been ‘tear-splattered’ by the rain (CW1, p. 133). Rosabel is disgusted by the reader, who mouths the words as she reads them and licks her finger as she turns the pages on the crowded bus. The quality of the text, the physical condition of the book, and the circumstances of its consumption all suggest the common, even the vulgar. Back in her cold, rented room, Rosabel goes over the events of the working day, and her mind fixes on a dashing, wealthy young couple she has waited on. She fantasises that she could change places with the woman and imagines she is engaged to the man. The fantasy continues, becoming more elaborate and detailed, until it comes to ‘a voluptuous night, a band playing, and her lovely white shoulders’ (CW1, p. 136, Mansfield's emphasis). She goes to sleep, and wakes to another cold dawn. Mansfield is at once critiquing the mass-produced visions afforded by middle-brow, escapist tales of passion, and showing how they insinuate themselves into the minds of even those who scorn to read them in printed form. This literature, it appears, can produce illusions without even being read. As Kate Fullbrook points out,