Women S Labour And The History Of The Book In Early Modern England

This collection reveals the valuable work that women achieved in publishing, printing, writing and reading early modern English books, from those who worked in the book trade to those who composed, selected, collected and annotated books. Women gathered rags for paper production, invested in books and oversaw the presses that printed them. Their writing and reading had an impact on their contemporaries and the developing literary canon. A focus on women's work enables these essays to recognize the various forms of labour -- textual and social as well as material and commercial -- that women of different social classes engaged in. Those considered include the very poor, the middling sort who were active in the book trade, and the elite women authors and readers who participated in literary communities. Taken together, these essays convey the impressive work that women accomplished and their frequent collaborations with others in the making, marking, and marketing of early modern English books.

This collection brings to light many of the women whose labours were important to the creation and consumption of early modern English books, from those who gathered linen rags on the streets of London for paper production, to those who ran printing houses and financed the production of books, sold them, wrote them, edited them, owned and read them. The evidence of extant books reveals that women who worked beside their husbands in printing houses and bookshops sometimes exerted considerable influence over their shops' business decisions. Most of the identifiable women stationers were widows, who often sought to minimize their financial risk through a conservative approach to publishing. But some were more enterpreneurial, expanding the network of those with whom they worked and increasing the number and types of books they issued. In their roles as authors, editors, and annotators, women further extended their impact on the history of early modern books. By considering women from widely differing backgrounds who engaged in manual, commercial, familial and literary forms of labour, this collection recovers women's participation in book history as never before.

This concise introduction provides an overview of the state of research on women's history in the early modern period. It emcompasses a guide to the historiography, an assessment of the major debates, and information about the varied sources available for women's history in this period. Arranged around familiar themes - the family, work, religion, education - the book presents a comprehensive survey of the social, economic and political position of women in England in the 16th and 17th centuries.

This collection reveals the valuable work that women achieved in publishing, printing, writing and reading early modern English books, from those who worked in the book trade to those who composed, selected, collected and annotated books. Women gathered rags for paper production, invested in books and oversaw the presses that printed them. Their writing and reading had an impact on their contemporaries and the developing literary canon. A focus on women's work enables these essays to recognize the various forms of labour -- textual and social as well as material and commercial -- that women of different social classes engaged in. Those considered include the very poor, the middling sort who were active in the book trade, and the elite women authors and readers who participated in literary communities. Taken together, these essays convey the impressive work that women accomplished and their frequent collaborations with others in the making, marking, and marketing of early modern English books.

Labors Lost offers a fascinating and wide-ranging account of working women's behind-the-scenes and hitherto unacknowledged contributions to theatrical production in Shakespeare's time. Natasha Korda reveals that the purportedly all-male professional stage relied on the labor, wares, ingenuity, and capital of women of all stripes, including ordinary crafts- and tradeswomen who supplied costumes, props, and comestibles; wealthy heiresses and widows who provided much-needed capital and credit; wives, daughters, and widows of theater people who worked actively alongside their male kin; and immigrant women who fueled the fashion-driven stage with a range of newfangled skills and commodities. Combining archival research on these and other women who worked in and around the playhouses with revisionist readings of canonical and lesser-known plays, Labors Lost retrieves this lost history by detailing the diverse ways women participated in the work of playing, and the ways male players and playwrights in turn helped to shape the cultural meanings of women's work. Far from a marginal phenomenon, the gendered division of theatrical labor was crucial to the rise of the commercial theaters in London and had an influence on the material culture of the stage and the dramatic works of Shakespeare and his contemporaries.

This is an original, accessible, and comprehensive survey of life as it was experienced by most Englishwomen during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The authors examine virtually all aspects of women's lives: female life-stages from birth to death; the separate culture of women,including female friendship and feminist consciousness; the diverse roles of women in the religious and political movements of the day; and the effect of prevailing perceptions of gender differences. Comparisons are made between the makeshift economy of poor women and the occupational identities,and preoccupations, of the middling and elite classes. This fascinating and well-illustrated book reconstructs the mental and material world of Tudor and Stuart women. It will become the standard text on the subject.

This concise and accessible book explores the history of gender in England between 1500 and 1700. Amidst the political and religious disruptions of the Reformation and the Civil War, sexual difference and gender were matters of public debate and private contention. Laura Gowing provides unique insight into gender relations in a time of flux, through sources ranging from the women who tried to vote in Ipswich in 1640, to the dreams of Archbishop Laud and a grandmother describing the first time her grandson wore breeches. Examining gender relations in the contexts of the body, the house, the neighbourhood and the political world, this comprehensive study analyses the tides of change and the power of custom in a pre-modern world. This book offers: Previously unpublished documents by women and men from all levels of society, ranging from private letters to court cases A critical examination of a new field, reflecting original research and the most recent scholarship In-depth analysis of historical evidence, allowing the reader to reconstruct the hidden histories of women Also including a chronology, who’s who of key figures, guide to further reading and a full-colour plate section, Gender Relations in Early Modern England is ideal for students and interested readers at all levels, providing a diverse range of primary sources and the tools to unlock them.

A nuanced re-evaluation of the ways in which gender affected the use of physical space in early modern England. Space was not simply a passive backdrop to a social system that had structural origins elsewhere; it was vitally important for marking out and maintaining the hierarchy that sustained social and gender order in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. Gender had a considerable influence on its use and organization; status and gender were displayed physically and spatially every moment of the day, from a person's place at table to the bed on which he orshe slept, in places of work and recreation, in dress, gesture and modes of address. Space was also the basis for the formation of gender identities which were constantly contested and restructured, as this book shows.Examining in turn domestic, social and sacred spaces and the spatial division of labour in gender construction, the author demonstrates how these could shift, and with them the position and power of women. She shows that the ideological assumption that all women are subject to all men is flawed, and exposes the limitations of interpretations which rely on the model and binary opposition of public/private, male/female, to describe gender relations and theirchanges across the period, thus offering a much more complex and picture than has hitherto been perceived. The book will be essential reading not just for historians of the family and of women, but for all those studying early modern social history. AMANDA FLATHER is a lecturer in the Department of History at the University of Essex.