Grossly Material Things: Women and Book Production in Early Modern England

Abstract

Helen Smith, Grossly Material Things: Women and Book Production in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). 272pp. ISBN 978 0 1996 5158 0.Helen Smith's Grossly Material Things is a fascinating, insightful, superbly researched book on the contributions women made to manuscript and book production in the Early Modern period. Anyone interested in the history of reading or of the book will learn a great deal from her investigation of what she calls 'the traces of women's labour' (p. 4); such labour often has been neglected by scholars. The great strength of her work is to refocus our attention on the web of gendered relations in writing, translating, patronizing, publishing and reading in this period.Smith's book is divided into five chapters and an epilogue. In the first chapter, she finds new evidence of the roles women played in the composition of texts, and argues that the editing, translation and copying practices she identifies as 'cross-sex collaboration' (p. 19) are themselves creative. In turn she discusses the scribal work of women, both inside and outside family structures; the act of translation as a 'skilled, and frequently a collaborative, venture' (p. 32); the role women played in the transmission of texts (in many cases after the death of a male author); and the voices of women in texts authored by men. She deftly describes how crucial women's contributions were to a variety of genres, whether directly as in the translation of a religious text, or more subtly in the way female voices were incorporated into a male-authored pamphlet. As for the role many widows played in the posthumous publication of their spouses' work, she rightly points out that there was 'a close link between the hands that tidied the corpse and the hands that tidied the corpus' (p. 43).The second chapter is devoted to patronage. Early Modern women were commissioning texts, sponsoring individual printers, and supporting the publication of individual works. Smith cites a plethora of previous research that has been done in this area; she also argues that much of this work has taken too narrow a view of patronage. For example, she finds claims that many female patrons were at the center of large literary coteries overstated. She also shows that '[w]omen's ongoing interest in, and association with, the trade in printed books challenges the narrative which sets a democratic, public, and (by implication) male, marketplace of print against an aristocratic, manuscript-based, and (by implication) female tradition of patronage' (p. 86).Chapters 3 and 4 describe the multitudinous ways women participated more directly in the print trade, both within the Stationers' Company and outside it. These two chapters are high points of Grossly Material Things. While men certainly dominated the production and trade in books, as chapter 3 demonstrates a number of women worked with their husbands in running a printing business. …