Rethinking and Re-viewing Data

the three projects we describe here seek to expand the ways in which we understand women's relationships with texts by theorizing and applying robust methodologies to the study of early modern women's book ownership, eighteenth-century women's libraries, and women's compilation of manuscript verse miscellanies. This work challenges assumptions and biases in book history—in particular, the perceived absence of evidence in terms of both the texts themselves and the textual and intellectual labor involved in their production. One of the most exciting aspects of women's book history is the variety and scope of "new" source materials hiding in plain sight in libraries and archives around the world. Although many of these items remain inaccessible to scholars for various practical reasons (location, time, and funds are always factors), often the primary barrier is conceptual: the simple perception of a lack of evidence. In fact, we have found plenty of material when searching for women-created manuscript verse miscellanies and the records of women's libraries and book ownership. The sheer numbers of manuscript or textual witnesses involved have, however, made it difficult to assess and analyze the material. We have all struggled with the problem of genre, because of both the lack of defining conceptual parameters and the idiosyncrasies of surviving witnesses. Each of our studies aims, therefore, to make some of these "new" forms of contemporary evidence accessible to more systematic study and interpretation.

Such data-driven work has the potential to transform histories of reading. Like many of our colleagues in this special issue, we believe that careful framing and processing of the quantitative data is a necessary groundwork for qualitative analyses. This calls for preliminary theorizing and categorizing. We have found ourselves questioning the nature of our sources (when is a book not a book?), the utility of genre designations (what does "literature" mean to the Countess of Hertford versus the Duchess of Northumberland?), and measures of popularity (why does the canon of manuscript poetry collections differ from that of print?). Recovery and making visible are important processes in women's book history; however, it is equally critical to establish standards and contexts of comparison for what is recovered. We need to build data sets large enough to allow comparison if we are to address the many generalizations and questions that pertain to women's reading, curating, and adapting of literary and popular texts. But in order to do this, we need to identify, locate, and create typologies of various genres of sources. For example, because the catalogs, book lists, wills, and inventories that are witnesses to women's book ownership and libraries use variable generic frameworks, they reveal and conceal different data. Quantitative research also asks us to assess more precisely various forms of qualitative agency in the communications circuit, whether of book collector or reader, consumer or curator, copyist or adapter.

This type of work reveals that women's book history is not a "narrow" or "niche" pursuit; rather, it contributes to and intersects with scholarly understandings of class, gender, literacy, geography, generations, and communities of reading. It helps us chart the continuities and evolutions in the circulation of ideas and in economies of culture more broadly. Finally, it continues the fundamental work of book history in breaking down disciplinary boundaries as well as textual categories, such as the literary versus the popular or ephemeral.

Perhaps most importantly, we also encourage the sharing and networking of data and materials for further work. Scholars of book history are sitting on innumerable files and spreadsheets that are never made public. Such valuable intellectual labor deserves more credit and could have more impact if it were easier to access, cite, and share. One of the greatest benefits of the Women in Book History symposium that gave rise to this special issue was the generosity with which everyone shared their types of evidence, their working files and databases, their failures, their successes, and their best practices. The material evidence for an expanded women's book history is waiting on the shelves of archives and libraries around the...