The Laughing Tortoise: Speculations on Manuscript Sources and Women's Book History

Abstract

The recovery and study of manuscript texts remains an important endeavor for those interested in early modern women writer, as much as it is an important part of recovering artifacts of literary history. These artifacts increase the amount of material on which we base our conclusions, but one could argue that such texts offer more than simply evidence of literary production. Unfortunately, the tendency in the new field of the history of the book to define “book” as being a printed object threatens once again to marginalize women's participation in literary culture in the same way that previous models of literary history based on “great man” or spirit of the age did in previous generations. Using as a case study the newly recovered manuscript volume by Hester Pulter (1595/96–1678), this essay concludes by examining some premises about early modern women's participation in various aspects of literary culture as being “exceptional,” or anomalous, or whether instead we are still in the process of recovering the materials that would make such conclusions warranted.