As is becoming increasingly clear in the study of early modern Englishwomen’s literacy and textual practices, women had numerous points of contact with the written word. In the many instances where we cannot claim with certainty how much of a book a woman read (if at all) or how she read a particular genre (if at all) or whether an anonymous manuscript poem derived from a particular woman’s pen or whether a woman’s inscription in a book was made by the same reader as manuscript markings elsewhere in the same book, what we can say with increasing confidence is that women’s exposure to texts—both print and manuscript, both “popular” and “literary”—was wide-ranging and often quite stimulating for the women themselves. Consequently, we are well positioned to reevaluate women’s role in the development of print culture, a point convincingly demonstrated by the eleven essays collected in Anne Lawrence-Mathers and Phillipa Hardman’s Women and Writing, c. 1340–c. 1650: The Domestication of Print Culture.

Despite the title’s emphasis on “print,” the book’s contributors are most interested in the transitional period during which manuscript and print coexisted and specifically in how women contributed to or otherwise participated in this complex textual landscape. Thus, some of the essays deal with manuscript, or scribal, publication rather than print. Taken collectively, the essays in this book paint a vivid picture of an early modern England in which women were actively engaged in the world of ideas, even if they did not fill the traditional roles of sole author or designated reader of a text. Instead, intellectually engaged women across a span of three hundred years interacted with texts in numerous other, and arguably equally valuable, ways. These women read a wide range of texts, including romance, and taught their children from these texts within the household setting (Hardman’s “Domestic Learning and Teaching”). They formed a potential audience for the highly popular and practical almanac, which “offered vital information on areas of household and horticultural activity traditionally assigned to, and carried out by, women” (Lawrence-Mathers, “Domesticating the Calendar,” 36). They offered astute and valuable translations of ecclesiastical works (Gemma Allen’s essay on Anne Bacon). They read and shared texts like Chaucer’s Works across generations (Alison Wiggins’s “Frances Wolfreston’s Chaucer”), and they learned to author in part through the process of compiling (Adam Smyth’s “Commonplace Book Culture”). Women engaged in politically charged letter writing (James Daybell’s essay on Lady Penelope Rich’s letter to Elizabeth I) and made thoughtful epistolary choices even when composing and sending letters to family members (Graham Williams’s essay on Joan Thynne’s letters). Women also participated in the copying and collecting of poetry, sometimes with the consequence of trying their own hands at verse (Elizabeth Heale’s “Fathers and Daughters”), and women received, shared, and contributed to manuscript collections that were created initially as gifts (C. B. Hardman’s “The Book as Domestic Gift”). Life-writing women like Elizabeth Isham developed complex composition practices (Alice Eardley’s “Like hewen stone”), and still other women (or individuals claiming a female voice) experimented with ways to enter the seventeenth-century pamphlet debate concerning their own sex (Anna Bayman’s “Female Voices in Early Seventeenth Century Pamphlet Literature”).

In other words, late medieval and early modern Englishwomen’s points of contact with texts and the conversations surrounding them cannot be underestimated. Building on studies of material culture, book history, and related inquiries into women’s engagement with print culture, this collection makes clear that, when one asks different questions than those that have traditionally guided literary studies, and when one moves beyond the artificially juxtaposed categories of print versus manuscript and private versus public, one sees an entirely different textual landscape, one in which women participated in the intellectual exchange of ideas and texts even within the domestic spaces in which their lives were primarily lived.

Thus, Smyth’s essay, “Commonplace Book Culture: A List of Sixteen Traits,” redirects the conversation about commonplace books by suggesting the broader category “commonplace book culture” instead of the more narrowly defined “commonplace book.” In the process of delineating the primary characteristics of this “culture,” Smyth further considers the implications of this change for women in particular, as the broader category allows us to see more clearly how women found and practiced agency in relation to this highly textual practice. In “Francis Wolfreston’s Chaucer,” Wiggins’s insightful analysis of annotations in a single copy of Chaucer’s Works explains how women of multiple generations read, shared, and commented on an important piece of literature within a domestic setting. And Alice Eardley, in “‘Like hewen stone’: Augustine, Audience and Revision in Elizabeth Isham’s ‘Booke of Rememberance’ (c. 1639),” engages in a fascinating comparative analysis of Isham’s various writings in order to reconstruct her composition and revision methods, as well as Isham’s representation of the writing of her life itself as a pious act, or labor. As these examples suggest, women found numerous spaces in which to act as readers, collectors, givers, translators, writers, and creators of texts.

Yet the collection is not without its flaws. Not all of the essays are as groundbreaking as the three described above, and many of the essays are often more speculative than conclusive, in part because the very nature of the inquiry requires a degree of “creative license” acknowledged outright by Heale but not always conducive to satisfying conclusions. Furthermore, the deconstruction of the public/private divide that occupies many of these essays has been well underway for some time now.

Therefore, what the contributors do best is to explore the spaces that have been revealed by this deconstruction process. It is in this way that Women and Writing makes a powerful impression, raising critical questions, inspiring further investigations, and offering valuable contributions to scholarly conversations about women’s literacies as well as the transition to print culture more generally.