Minding the Gap(s)

this cluster of essays explores women's labor in printing houses; women as composers and collectors of oral culture and national song on the peripheries of the British Isles; and a project to introduce a diverse group of students to a little-known eighteenth-century archive by a little-known eighteenth-century woman. Although the essays address very different subjects, they share common concerns: what has been left out of book historical narratives thus far, and how the perspective of women's book history can reframe those narratives. In doing so, the essays question both the media history of primary sources as it has been told and the archive as it has been collected and accessed. We, the authors, recognize that further absences and gaps will inevitably be discovered (both in the essays themselves and in this response), but we make the case for focusing on processes of research—such as collecting, making, and archival research—rather than just the finished products. Reflecting on these processes of doing research prompts us to ask questions as well about the processes of reading: Reader, who are you? Where are you sitting? What stories do you bring to this experience?

All three essays draw attention to the importance of examining the relationship between material bodies and textual materials, both in terms of the initial creation of those texts by actual gendered human beings and in terms of the subsequent study of those texts by scholars who also possess flesh-and-blood bodies. In her essay, Cait Coker addresses the issue of gender in both the eighteenth-century printing house and current scholarly projects seeking to re-create those practices, asking, who are the female bodies in the print shop in the eighteenth century—and those in the locations involved in the production of this document right now? Leith Davis examines three women who foregrounded bodies that speak and sing while producing printed texts. To this, we ask, how did female ballad collectors emphasize the orality within print culture in the records they made, and how, as students and scholars in the present, do we ourselves both engage with and critique intermedial work? Rachael Scarborough King brings the traces of the forgotten bodies (and dreams) of Mary Leadbeater and her Quaker community of Ballitore, County Kildare, Ireland, together with a community of new scholars whose own embodied experiences enable them to connect with and critique those experiences in innovative ways. Here, we ask, how does the initial mediation of experiences affect reception both historically and in the present?

These essays share an interest not just in widening and deepening the canon of eighteenth-century literature and culture but also in fundamentally changing the kinds of knowledges that are deployed in making decisions about what should be included in that canon. Coker points to the knowledge that is gained by using a gendered, experiential-humanities approach to the subject of book history; Davis gestures to the importance of considering what might be called acoustic knowledge; and King indicates how undergraduate and graduate students can bring their personal knowledge to the study of archival materials. Taken together, the essays suggest how a women's book history approach can not only encourage the recovery of important voices that have been left out of the story of book history but also fundamentally alter who gets to write the story and what kind of story is written in the future. We, the authors, are "doing" women's book history as a methodology in itself as we incorporate it into material, archival, and pedagogical studies to unite rather than divide our various discourses.

Each essay also identifies intellectual gaps in terms of what does not get seen in historical documentation and in scholarship. In focusing on book production's materiality, Coker bypasses traditional work on authorship and publication to revisit labor as a physical process rather than a product. In rereading the convoluted relationship between oral songs and printed works, Davis addresses the generic hierarchy that has assigned greater value to the materiality of print. And, in looking at nontraditional archival users, King reveals how...