Women and the Book Trade in Sixteenth-Century France (review)

Reviews 199 Parergon 20.1 (2003) The only paradox emerging from this rather relentless but impressive collection is that it risks overvaluing Barnfield’s work for precisely the same reason as it used to be marginalized. However, the book’s publication should pave the way for more subtle appreciations of the poetic integrity and originality of this appealing poet of love. R. S. White English, Communication and Cultural Studies The University of Western Australia Broomhall, Susan, Women and the Book Trade in Sixteenth-Century France (Women and Gender in the Early Modern World), Aldershot, England/ Burlington, VT, Ashgate, 2002; hardback; RRP US$69.95, £40.00; ISBN 0754606716. In this richly detailed study, Susan Broomhall offers a precise account of the extent and nature of female participation in printing and writing during the sixteenth century in France. Based upon her research into more than 100 women printers and writers, her account comes to life within two important historical contexts. The first, which naturally occupies most of the work, is the maledominated French book trade of the time. As Broomhall writes, women’s work in sixteenth-century publication differs from men’s in significant ways and therefore deserves a study of its own. The second context, also important, is that of female participation in other trades during that same period. The result is a ground-breaking work indispensable not only for historians of the book but also for anyone interested in the lives of working women during the sixteenth century. The study is divided into two sections. The first four chapters explore the contexts of women’s participation in the book trade in numerous capacities not normally considered in other studies of women in the writing field: as ‘readers, owners and collectors of both manuscript and printed books’ (p. 11). Broomhall cautions that the relatively abundant evidence concerning women’s work in printing must be read carefully, and she dispels some prevalent myths, for example, that this trade provided better opportunities for women than others. In fact, the printing trade in France in its earliest years developed as ‘an extension of the manuscript market’ (p. 51) and thus it ‘absorbed and constructed female participation’ (p. 50) on the model of commercial manuscript production, 200 Reviews Parergon 20.1 (2003) where women had always been marginalised. Working from a broad definition of publication as both scribal and print, Broomhall discusses the different forms women chose for publication (when they chose to publish – as she demonstrates, some women’s work was published by family members after their deaths). Her data suggest that writing by women appears in fewer than 1% of all print publications in France throughout the sixteenth century. Restricted by their circumstances and contemporary ideas of the ‘good woman,’ women necessarily published in forms different from the ones men chose. In the second section, Broomhall examines published female authors and some of the principal strategies they employed to ‘exploit marginal sites for increased, and often subversive, discursive agency’ (p. 11). The first of these strategies is geographical. Although literacy, closely correlated with the use of the dialect of Ile-de-France, was significantly higher in the north of France than in the south, almost half of the published female writers whose location is known lived and worked in the south. Why? ‘Could women draw attention to their literary geo-cultural locations to resist male-centred literary traditions in northern France? Could they exploit their location as a resisting geography from the publication conventions in the north?’ Broomhall wonders. Her short surveys of female literary activity in Lyons, Toulouse, and the royal court at Nérac where Marguerite of Navarre presided, indicate that this was the case. A second strategy, which becomes visible from the 1570s, was for women to make use of their position in the family as a site for developing new types of female speech. Writes Broomhall: ‘Women writers, contextualizing their writings within the household arena, used the ambiguity surrounding the varied expectations of women in the family to develop literary constructions of their roles in the post-Reformation family’ (p. 155). Before this, women had generally addressed a female friend or a public of other women; now they...