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

Part I. Pleasures and Prohibitions

Part I Pleasures and Prohibitions The prohibitions that helped define girls’ and women’s reading between 1500 and 1800 in Europe and America were nearly always founded on cultural attitudes that cast reading as powerful and potentially transformative. Sometimes, particularly in matters of religious controversy , this power was centered on the soul. Two laws enacted a century and an ocean apart reached opposite conclusions about women ’s appropriate relationship to the Bible, but they depended equally on the assumption that access to the English Bible was a critical matter of the soul. The 1543 Act for the Advancement of True Religion under Henry VIII criminalized the reading of the Tyndale Bible by most Englishwomen, allowing only gentlewomen to read to ‘‘themselves alone’’ but not to anyone else in their household. Conversely, in 1642 New England law required full literacy in English, even for ‘‘children & apprentices.’’ More often, however, in prescriptive literature at least if not in law, prohibitions against female literacy and reading were based in the body and its many pleasures. As the essays in this section demonstrate , prescriptions do not, of course, always prevail, but they do usefully locate and describe a set of cultural anxieties and forces. Further, reading, whether it was transgressive or not, for many women constituted pleasure in many forms: sensual and erotic, surely, but also intellectual , material, social, and devotional. Personal pleasures and cultural prohibitions intersected in the marketplace . Mary Ellen Lamb examines two opposing portraits of female readers—the frivolous consumer of romances and the pious reader of devotionals—that begin to define women’s relationships with emergent capitalism. As they link romance reading, luxury goods, and sexual grati- fication, John Lyly and Philip Stubbes draw the caricatures against which women would define themselves as readers and consumers in a rapidly shifting consumer economy. The heightened attention to the trope of the erotically charged gentlewoman reader, voraciously consuming books and desiring sexual pleasures, posed a marketing challenge for authors and printers, for the sexualized female reader had now to be seduced, not merely satirized. The contrasting stereotype of the pious female reader also had a place in the market of print. Perhaps 40 percent of the increase in book production around 1600 was made up of Bibles and devotional texts. Women’s self-defining through book consumption extended beyond the fashion of romances to the rewards of piety, promising the possibility of allowing women to entertain spiritual questions previously reserved for men and to elevate themselves above the commodification of gentlewomen readers at leisure. Shakespeare may now seem an unlikely subject for anxiety about women ’s reading given more modern valuations of the cultural capital of his plays and their accessibility for his contemporaries as public perform- 14 Pleasures and Prohibitions ances. Yet, as Sasha Roberts explains, Shakespeare’s narrative poems figure prominently in seventeenth-century articulations of the trope of women’s reading as merely—and often dangerously—recreational. The records of women’s unprecedented engagement with drama in Caroline England, however, show women disrupting these stereotypes and responding to plays much as male readers did. Conduct literature of the time therefore might best be taken, Roberts argues, as reactionary rather than formative. The targets of this prescriptive literature and of misogynist barbs in contemporary drama were often elite or otherwise privileged women. By no coincidence, these women were exercising new independence as consumers in the print marketplace, and by the 1640s printers no longer had any business overlooking women’s participation in literary culture and the formation of theatrical taste. The role of self-fashioning through reading and the participation of women in the formation of literary taste converge in Mary Kelley’s study of women’s reading in the final years of the eighteenth century and in the early Republic. As the number of books written and printed by Americans increased in these years, a monumental change in readers’ sensibility occurred: reading shifted from a trope of eroticism and devotion to a symbol of enterprise. Whereas seventeenth-century women’s reading in early America was concentrated on Scripture, eighteenthcentury elite culture modeled girls’ education on the literary training of their British peers, flooding their libraries with histories and belles lettres . Though the early modern anxieties about romances articulated by Lamb and Roberts persisted and focused on the emergent novel, young women now had regular access to a range of genres in circulating...