Women's Bookscapes in Early Modern Britain: Reading, Ownership, Circulation ed. by Leah Knight et al. (review)

This edited collection is justly described in an afterword by Margaret Ezell as a "landmark" in scholarship on early modern women's writing in Britain (275). Its exceptional quality lies in the originality and scope offered by its organizing category of the bookscape, as defined in its introduction by two of the volume's editors, Leah Knight and Micheline White. The bookscape is a flexible concept, akin to landscape, that allows a reconsideration of multiple aspects of women's book use and production, from case studies of individual readers and writers through communities and networks of book exchange to the possibilities offered by recent digital approaches to early modern women as writers and readers. The bookscape provides a platform to think differently about women's book history, in ways that are capitalized upon by the essays in this collection to produce genuinely provocative and new research.

Divided into three parts, the collection begins relatively conventionally with a section containing five individual case studies. In some ways the least transformative of the collection's research, the essays collected here nevertheless offer new perspectives on each of the early modern women that they consider, covering the marginalia of Katherine Parr, the book ownership of Anne Bradstreet and Elizabeth Isham, and the reading practices of Isabella Whitney and Margaret Cavendish in light of their own writing and political programs of action. Cumulatively, these essays illustrate the scope of the bookscape for women readers, writers, and collectors across different classes, locations, and periods within early modern England and North America. Early modern women are seen to engage with their books in ways that promote broader familial, religious, and political agendas. Most notably, essays by Mary Ellen Lamb and Julie Crawford together reconsider early modern women's use of humanism, often associated with the male schoolroom, persuasively arguing through intertextual and material evidence for Whitney's and Cavendish's sophisticated deployment of humanist reading practices within their writing.

The collection expands further in its second section, where bookscapes surrounding individual writers are expanded to focus upon the reading practices of communities and the attendant networks of sociality and exchange. Paul Dyck's essay on the fascinating compositional practices of the Little Gidding community exemplifies the richness of this approach in its meticulous and imaginative analyses, but the main strength and originality of this section lies in the new light it casts on Catholic women's bookscapes. In three interrelated essays by Elizabeth Patton, Jaime Goodrich, and Caroline Bowden, a compelling case is made for the importance of integrating women from Catholic communities, religious orders and networks into our understanding of early modern women's literary history. Recently discovered inventories of confiscated books, accounts of Catholic women's covert reading and book use within spiritual communities in England, as well as records of reading and book circulation in continental convents for English girls and women offer illuminating new material on early modern women and the book. In particular, Jaime Goodrich's analysis of marginalia within the common libraries of English Benedictine convents delineates new kinds of annotation that expand our understanding of how books were owned and marked differently by women writers within cloistered communities. Her essay might be read productively alongside that of Micheline White on Katherine Parr's marginalia in the first section as examples of how this collection encompasses revised understandings of women's book use, building upon existing scholarship and providing new approaches, case studies, and models.

The next section of the collection offers a third "prospect" from which to survey the field, asking how recent digital approaches to the bookscape are causing us to reconsider not only how women used their books but also how we have understood, measured, and analyzed such encounters (6). The essays range from the hands-on to the theoretical, beginning with Sarah Lindenbaum's informative, useful, and considered...