Reading Women: Literacy, Authorship, and Culture in the Atlantic World, 15-18

Part III. Translation and Authorship

Part III Translation and Authorship As the essays earlier in the collection suggest, reading is embedded in a range of social, textual, and material practices, and readers survive in the historical record only when some form of textual or visual production accompanied or followed their reading. Reading on its own, in other words, is invisible. In this final section of the volume the essays focus on textual production of various sorts: storytelling, testifying, translation, transcription, composition. Even as they attend to production in these various forms, this final cluster of essays affirms the connections between reading, speaking, listening, interpreting, and writing. As the essays in Part I reveal, conduct manuals and other prescriptive literature in early modern England circumscribed girls’ and women’s reading. One seventeenth-century writer situated these prescriptions specifically in relation to both accomplishment and authorship, proposing appropriate reading for a gentleman’s daughters: ‘‘In stead of Song and Musicke, let them learne Cookery and Laundrie. And in stead of reading Sir Philip Sidneys Arcadia, let them read the grounds of good huswifery . I like not a female Poetresse at any hand.’’1 Girls should learn practical domestic work, that is, rather than aristocratic accomplishments , and they should eschew romance reading precisely because it might provoke them to write. Two generations earlier Margaret Tyler (fl. 1578) used the relationship between reading and writing to challenge such prohibitions in an early defense of female authorship. Significantly , her defense is based on women’s right to translate texts. If men dedicate books to women, she reasons, women may read them, and if allowed to read, women should be permitted to respond by translating; for translation is a modest activity, an extension of reading, demanding more ‘‘heede then deepe invention or exquisite learning.’’2 Indeed, early modern Englishwomen, like the American women studied here, published primarily in genres that relied explicitly on their readings of other texts: translations, compilations, refutations, and editions.3 Because the relationship between women’s reading and writing was often complicated and sometimes obscured, this section of the volume imagines authorship and translation in broad terms: authorship imagined or documented, translation of texts, genres, and traditions. Just as the story of women’s reading is not an unbroken, ever-upward trajectory toward expanding literacies, the story of female authorship and female storytelling is not a straightforward, teleological push toward ever greater liberties for women writers. As Ian Moulton demonstrates in his essay, the stereotypical, self-effacing female novelist of the nineteenth century owed far more to the prescriptive virtues codified in the Renaissance —silence, chastity, and obedience—than to the livelier models of female storytellers that prevailed in the medieval period. Bridging the oral culture of storytelling and the print culture of the novel is the Conti- 148 Translation and Authorship nental novelle, one of the first genres that European women began to dominate as authors. In its subject matter, characters, and language— vernacular, straightforward, familial—the novelle evokes female experience more than male scholarly authority. The translation of the Continental novelle into an English tradition, however, displaced female readers and storytellers from the center of the form. While Puritan ideals would seem to invite women into the circle of literacy and exegesis, the story of colonial New England women’s spiritual and intellectual lives is a ‘‘very mixed history,’’ as Janice Knight observes, full of stereotypes and setbacks, dependent on partial and indirect evidence framed by a patriarchal culture. While Puritan ideals encouraged, indeed mandated, women’s engagement with the Bible, their authority as readers and exegetes was challenged at critical moments of crisis and controversy. In her attention to Anne Hutchinson ’s trials, Mary Rowlandson’s captivity narrative, and Mercy Short’s demonic possession, Knight demonstrates the narrowing after the 1630s of the Puritan ideals of democratized religious authority and the expansion of literacy across gender and class boundaries. Further, she identi- fies the poignancy of the glimpses of these three women’s inner lives, which are mediated through men’s words. Rowlandson’s best-seller is contained by her husband’s sermon on her captivity and by Increase Mather’s preface. To consider Hutchinson and, even more radically, Short in the context of authorship is to explore the complicated and profound way in which orality and textuality were intertwined in Puritan America, as in early modern England. Men recorded Hutchinson’s words at her two trials, and our...