This ambitious, well-researched, and timely study sets out to revise our understanding not only of early modern women's roles in book production (as its subtitle promises) but also of their myriad contributions to the entire “communications circuit,” including the commissioning, manufacture, distribution, and consumption of print publications in England, and between England and the Continent. The book's admirably broad approach is one of its great strengths, as is the deep archival research that supports its claims and the conceptual work it does to demonstrate the stakes of these claims for the broader field. For these reasons, it will be of interest to a wide array of readers including, but not limited to, specialists in book history.

Smith's title, Grossly Material Things, derives from Virginia Woolf's claim in A Room of One's Own that “[f]iction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached . . . to grossly material things, like health and money and the houses we live in” (2). In Smith's study, the “web” in question is not fiction, however, but the entire matrix of print culture, which is not simply attached to or dependent upon material or economic underpinnings, but is itself composed of “commercial, intellectual, technological, and corporeal encounters” between material “objects, persons, and processes” (9–10). Smith's materialist framework casts a wide web indeed, one that enables her to move beyond previous case studies of individual women authors, stationers, and readers to consider larger patterns of female involvement in the book trade, with impressive results.

In chapter 1, Smith broadens the purview of recent work on early modern women writers by focusing instead on scenes of writing and women's varied contributions to a range of writerly activities, including translation, editing, manuscript exchange, commonplacing, and the scribal work of amanuenses and professional scriveners. Authorship is here conceived as less an individual, circumscribed act than an ongoing composite and collaborative process—a continual reworking of texts over time. Smith steers us away from conceptualizing such activities as merely mechanical, subordinate, or derivative, by foregrounding their creative, transformative potential. Whereas previous work on collaborative authorship focuses on male homosocial collaboration within institutions such as the universities, Inns of Court, and public theaters, Smith looks beyond these institutions to mixed-sex and female collaborations within and outside the family and domestic sphere. While including discussion of well-known figures like Elizabeth Cary, Mary (Sidney) Herbert, Margaret Hoby, Esther Inglis, and Lucy Russell, Smith uncovers a host of lesser-known women writers on both sides of the confessional divide. Included in her analysis of the many forms of women's writing is a detailed consideration of female translators (of verse, plays, prose narratives and treatises, and religious texts) and female editors, who selected, transcribed, revised, arranged, and otherwise prepared the texts of male kin for publication, often adding paratexts of their own.

Female patronage broadly construed is the subject of chapter 2, which focuses on women's sponsorship of many aspects of print culture. Challenging the notion that female textual production and patronage were primarily located within aristocratic networks of manuscript production and circulation, and gave way to an emergent, marketplace of print dominated by men, Smith details women's active roles in sponsoring and promoting authors and publishers of printed texts, emphasizing that manuscript and print culture operated as overlapping systems throughout the early modern period. Her capacious definition of female patronage considers ideal and actual women readers whose imagined responses influenced the composition of texts; female commissioners of texts who set initial parameters; female agents in the process of print publication; and female recipients of speculative dedications made with an expectation of financial reward. In the course of this survey, Smith demonstrates just how contingent and occasional patronage relationships often were, and details the many different types of texts sponsored by women, including poetry, masques, vernacular translations, conduct manuals, dictionaries, devotional and polemical texts, among many others.

Perhaps the most impressive and original contribution to current scholarship is made in chapter 3, which offers a wide-ranging account of women's contributions to the printing trade, not only detailing the work of female printers and booksellers but also including women's broader participation in the day-to-day social and economic activities of the Stationers' Company, as well as the centrality of female labor to the company's institutional and civic life. Building on the groundbreaking work of Maureen Bell on female publishers in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England, Smith focuses on women's earlier involvement in the print trade, beginning with the incorporation of the Stationers' Company in 1557. Although widows who took over their deceased husbands' businesses are the most readily visible in the company's records, Smith persuasively argues that wives actively assisted their husbands and took over running businesses in their absence. The activities of wives and widows included managing apprentices, overseeing print production and the transmission of copy, negotiating with buyers, and pursuing their own legal interests at law. At least on occasion, Smith demonstrates, women participated in mechanical aspects of the print trade, such as composing type, bookbinding, and pulling wet sheets from the press. Although the decisions of female stationers regarding copy were certainly informed by financial incentives, Smith shows that they were also influenced by political or religious commitments. Of particular interest in this chapter is the evidence Smith adduces of female literacy among women in the print trade, including that of women readers, writers, and book collectors.

Smith widens the book's purview still further in chapter 4 by moving beyond London and the Stationers' Company to consider women's involvement in provincial, peripatetic, and illicit forms of book production and dissemination in England and Scotland, as well as between the British Isles and the Continent. Building on the work of Margaret Spufford and Tessa Watt, this chapter details the activities of women in the production and dissemination of cheap print in England, including female patentees, printers, and booksellers, as well as chapwomen, mercury women, and female hawkers. The chapter then discusses women's involvement in networks of production and distribution between the British Isles and Northern Europe, aimed at niche markets (e.g., readers of bilingual or polyglot texts) as well as at religious radicals and exiles. Here, Smith usefully considers the extent to which women's religious and political identities shaped their involvement in the print trade, and documents the linguistic and national borders they crossed in the process.

In chapter 5, Smith surveys and contributes to recent scholarship on women's reading practices, focusing on reading as an embodied activity, on the places of reading, and on reading as an active, transformative process. Building on the work of Heidi Brayman Hackel, Julie Crawford, Bill Sherman, and others, this chapter includes discussion of female commonplacing; note taking and marginalia; differences between the reading practices of Protestant and Catholic women; contemporary understandings of female reading as an embodied act and physiological process; and the places, both public and private, in which women read.

A final epilogue considers the multiples ways in which books, as “grossly material things,” were literally taken up by women, that is, how women's bodies and books physically interacted, not only in the act of reading, but also when women gave them as gifts, wore them tied to their girdles, embroidered book covers, and otherwise interacted with books as material objects in daily life. In short, Smith's valuable study offers nothing less than a new history of the book in early modern England, by detailing women's active involvement in every stage of print production, circulation, and consumption.