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  • 'Grossly Material Things': Women and Book Production in Early Modern England by Helen Smith
  • N. C. Aldred (bio)
'Grossly Material Things': Women and Book Production in Early Modern England. By Helen Smith. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2012. 254 pp. £60. ISBN 978 0 19 965158 0.

The title of Helen Smith's book is a studiously defiant snub of Virginia Woolf's then-putative argument, made in her A Room of One's Own of 1928, that Renaissance women participated little, if at all, in the authorship and production of books. Smith's women-centred concern with the English book trade is lightly reflected in the jacket cover — a detail from Gabriel Metsu's An Old Woman with a Book — which portrays a woman handling a folio volume possessively, her eyes cagily looking at some object outside of the picture, as if disturbed from her study.

Taking as its basis the structure of Robert Darnton's communications circuit (1982), the book outlines, in five chapters, the active role of women, who, often in collaboration with men, were authors, producers, disseminators, and readers of manuscript and print. In her section on female composition, Smith discusses the work of women as domestic amanuenses (such as Esther Inglis) and the role of women within the Protestant tradition's emphasis on the importance of the divine Word as 'transmitted through devout bodies' (p. 28). Religion is also of importance in translation, for, as Smith details, post-Reformation nuns were involved in the translation of religious works; sometimes their names would be on the book's title-page while the author's was not, implying a form of transferred authority from (often male) author to (female) translator. Women's voices might be found in the genre of the 'monstrous birth pamphlet' (p. 49), in which midwives demonstrated their knowledge of birthing. Smith also highlights the importance of patronage in the production of printed texts. Stressing in particular the need for a definition of patronage to be 'capacious' (p. 54) in order to accommodate for social networks and various aspects of interwoven discourses, Smith uses as case studies the patronage of women including Lucy Russell, Countess of Bedford, and Mary (Sidney) Herbert, in order to demonstrate their significant, if overlooked, role in patronage and print.

Moving from the compositional to the productive Smith presents a meticulous study of the participation of women in all aspects of book production. In her assessment of women and the Stationers she argues that women and their labour were 'central to the early modern book trades' (p. 89) around the time of the incorporation of the Company of Stationers in 1557 to the mid-seventeenth century (the role of women in the book trade in the later seventeenth century, as Smith states, has [End Page 220] been evaluated in the work of Paula McDowell and Maureen Bell, among others). Smith's inclusion of widows is probably of no surprise, particularly given the role of the Widow Danter in the production of Shakespeare's playtexts, but she also discusses the high literacy of women in the book trade, as well as the presence of women in the Stationers' Registers, noting in particular that what little evidence there is for the particularities of women's work 'comes in the form of punishment and prohibition' (p. 96): an order of 1635 mentions the banning of girls as well as boys in the removal of wet sheets from the press; an aldermanic committee of 1586 prohibited women from binding unless they were a binder's wife or daughter. Although the evidence is slight, it is important evidence because it indicates that girls and women were a common presence in the book trades — perhaps common enough for their presence to be assumed rather than noted down.

The final sections — 'Dissemination' and 'Reading' — evaluate women as book traders both within and without the City of London, the networks that facilitate the exchange of material things, and, in the volume's last chapter, the articulated ideological issues that surrounded women as readers. Under 'Dissemination' Smith discusses women's rights in patents, monopolies in printing, and participation in socio-economic statements in the provision of rural locations...

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