My Gracious Silence: Women in the Mirror of 16th Century Printing in Western Europe (review)

Axel Erdmann, a Swiss book dealer deeply familiar with the published record of the sixteenth century, spent years gathering together a collection of books published or printed in Europe between 1501 and 1601 by women or written about women or by women. This book provides a very personal guide to the 138 books he was able to acquire, together with annotations on the authors and their works, a subject guide to the issues discussed in the books, and a bibliography of books and articles he explored to find and learn about the books with its own subject index. The publication of this book coincided with the sale of the collection to the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

The title serves as a warning. When Shakespeare had Coriolanus refer to his wife as "my gracious silence," he was reflecting the strong admonition to silence directed toward women by much of society of the time, both classical and Christian, Renaissance and Reformation. Erdmann collected only thirty female authors for his section on "Women Writers" (100-29). He added a more complete list of women writers and their books (199-225), the great majority, or 211, from Italy. Another ninety-nine entries on books about women reflect women through the mirror of men's perceptions. Students of women in the sixteenth century will miss the large group of writers whose works come down to us in manuscript, only reaching print after 1600, as well as female authors brought to print before 1501, some of them quite popular in the sixteenth century. ¹ Less relevant to readers interested in attitudes toward women of the time is the book illustrated by a woman or those produced by women in the book business, since businesswomen necessarily directed their projects toward the largest audience of book buyers, men. Again, a more complete list follows of women in the printing business and their books (227-80), made up mostly of widows who continued the work of their husbands.

The women writers who made it to print were largely aristocratic figures who could subsidize the cost of publication. Erdmann points out that the most prolific female authors were those who paid for the publications themselves. He found that 6 percent of publications in England to 1640 were by female authors but estimates that number to be less than 1 percent for all of Europe. One of the most important titles is the Heptameron (1559) of Marguerite de Navarre (1492-1542), sister of King Francis I. The popular group of seventy-three stories that comment on the relations between the sexes was quickly translated into English. Less well known is Olympia Fulvia Morata (1526-55), who moved in the highest courtly circles as the companion from 1540 of Anna d'Este, daughter of Ercole II and Renée of France, sister of Francis I. She married in 1550 in the Protestant rite, and her Orationes,Dialoge,Epistolae, and Carmina in Latin and Greek were published in 1562 in Basel, making her one of the first women authors on the "Index of Prohibited Books." Through the first printed female correspondence, the letters of Madeleine des Roches (ca. 1520-87) and her daughter Catherine (1542-87), we can enter one of the most important salons in France.

A much larger category is Erdmann's books on and for women, gathered together to inform us about "commonly-held notions about women: major disputes, character, social role and religious obligations." Organized alphabetically by subject from adultery and beauty to witchcraft and work, they often restate misogynist opinions of the day. An exception is Juan Vives's Instruction of a Christian Woman, written for Catherine of Aragon and published in Latin in Antwerp in 1523. Before the end of the century it would be republished in over forty editions...