In 1500, as many as 99 out of 100 English women may have been illiterate, and girls of all social backgrounds were the objects of purposeful efforts to restrict their access to full literacy. Three centuries later, more than half of all English and Anglo-American women could read, and the female reader was emerging as a cultural ideal and a market force. While scholars have written extensively about women's reading in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and about women's writing in the early modern period, they have not attended sufficiently to the critical transformation that took place as female readers and their reading assumed significant cultural and economic power.
Reading Women brings into conversation the latest scholarship by early modernists and early Americanists on the role of gender in the production and consumption of texts during this expansion of female readership. Drawing together historians and literary scholars, the essays share a concern with local specificity and material culture. Removing women from the historically inaccurate frame of exclusively solitary, silent reading, the authors collectively return their subjects to the activities that so often coincided with reading: shopping, sewing, talking, writing, performing, and collecting. With chapters on samplers, storytelling, testimony, and translation, the volume expands notions of reading and literacy, and it insists upon a rich and varied narrative that crosses disciplinary boundaries and national borders.
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Editorial Reviews
Review
"Destined to become a landmark study and a fixture in the bibliographies of feminist and textual scholars, literary and social historians, students of the English Renaissance and the American Republic alike."—William Sherman, University of York
"Highly recommended."—Choice
"Reading Women . . . generously offers important new historical, textual, and theoretical ways of accessing, describing, and interpreting early modern women's reading."—Journal of American History
About the Author
Heidi Brayman Hackel is Associate Professor of English at University of California, Riverside and the author of Reading Material in Early Modern England: Print, Gender, and Literacy. Catherine E. Kelly is Associate Professor of History at the University of Oklahoma and author of In the New England Fashion: Reshaping Women's Lives in the Nineteenth Century.
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church trial, women translators, gentlewoman reader, gentlewomen readers, sewn letters, commonplace hook, early modern women Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
New York, Deborah Logan, Cambridge University Press, Chapel Hill, Oxford University Press, United States, New England, Cornell University Press, Young Lady, Katherine Stubbes, Aphra Behn, University of North Carolina Press, Early Modern England, Antinomian Controversy, Harvard University Press, Princeton University Press, American Republic, Short Story, Abigail Adams, Anne Hutchinson, Cotton Mather, Mercy Short, Catharine Macaulay, Renaissance Clothing, Hannah More Browse Sample Pages:
Front Cover | Table of Contents | First Pages | Index | Surprise Me!
church trial, women translators, gentlewoman reader, gentlewomen readers, sewn letters, commonplace hook, early modern women Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
New York, Deborah Logan, Cambridge University Press, Chapel Hill, Oxford University Press, United States, New England, Cornell University Press, Young Lady, Katherine Stubbes, Aphra Behn, University of North Carolina Press, Early Modern England, Antinomian Controversy, Harvard University Press, Princeton University Press, American Republic, Short Story, Abigail Adams, Anne Hutchinson, Cotton Mather, Mercy Short, Catharine Macaulay, Renaissance Clothing, Hannah More Browse Sample Pages:
Front Cover | Table of Contents | First Pages | Index | Surprise Me!
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