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Chapter 11 Reading Outside the Frame Robert A. Gross This brief afterword by a male reader comes at the close of a volume of learned essays composed almost entirely by females and focusing on women’s historical encounters with texts. It thereby depends on what has come before, taking its agenda from the contributors and developing its terms and themes from their central concerns. There is surely historical justice in that circumstance, for it reverses the gender roles that governed literary transactions in the Western world for centuries. As this collection demonstrates powerfully in its sweeping survey of books and reading from the Renaissance to the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, women were obliged to engage texts, whether in manuscript or print, through a male frame. Who wrote virtually all the books they read but men? Who controlled access to literacy and schooling? Who enjoyed a room of his own? Worse still, early modern women, even in the privileged circles of the aristocracy, could seldom take up a book with open minds and confident spirits. They were burdened by maleconstructed stereotypes designed to circumscribe their reading and curb their ambitions. The very male authors who deigned to address female readers belittled their audience as feather-brained show-offs interested only in passing pleasures or idealized them as pious souls submissive to God and his masculine representatives on earth. Men prescribed what women should read, how they should read, and what value their reading contained. If the printing revolution set in motion by Johannes Gutenberg unsettled traditional hierarchies, it took a while to affect the social relation between the sexes. Printing served the cause of patriarchy. Or so it presumed. In the face of all these obstacles, this volume documents persuasively, women asserted their wills, affirmed their desires, and ensured their presence in the republic of letters, even when they had to depend on works composed by men. Reading became a treasured activity in women’s lives, perhaps even, in Mary Kelley’s words, ‘‘a con- 248 Gross stant.’’ If any generalization is warranted from this collection, it is surely that men have constantly tried and failed to confine women’s minds by controlling their reading. Women of the early modern era entered the world of letters at a severe disadvantage. Everywhere, in Protestant and Catholic lands alike, a literacy gap divided the sexes. In the elite classes, to be sure, daughters as well as sons often learned to read; the skill was an ornament of privilege for some, a religious duty for others. However, the cultural premium resided in the education of boys, who went off to school for instruction both in the basics—writing and arithmetic—and in the advanced subjects that gave access to the classical tradition; their sisters remained at home for lessons in domestic skills. Not that female education was altogether neglected: Boarding schools for privileged girls were fashionable in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England, offering tuition in the same sophisticated arts of needlework, music, dancing, and writing that would be conveyed to their colonial counterparts across the Atlantic. Nonetheless, women lagged well behind men in the ability to write, and they were shut out of the classical training that became an arduous rite of passage for the future leaders of the British Empire. Such exclusions had the effect of barring women from independent cultural leadership. Without the ability to write, most women were consigned to the silence that Virginia Woolf once imagined as the inevitable fate of Judith Shakespeare, ‘‘the wonderfully gifted sister’’ of the bard who, had she existed, would have faced opposition at every turn to the cultivation of her genius and ultimately would have died of despair at her own hand. The bulk of the literature they read was written by men and available mainly under male aegis. Books were expensive, their prices kept artificially high by monopolistic publishers. The female readers of Shakespeare portrayed by Sasha Roberts were favored by patriarchal fortune . The folio edition studied by Lady Anne Merrick in 1638 had been issued fifteen years earlier at a price that removed Shakespeare from the popular audience that once flocked to his plays and snapped up his playbooks . So canonized, for a century and a half Shakespeare became a luxury good for the elites in church, state, and trade—and for the ladies who shared in their privilege.1 These barriers to female participation in literary culture were hardly impregnable. The implicit narrative in this collection...

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