Title: Do Manuscript Studies Have a Future in Early Modern Women Studies
Abstract: FOR THOSE INTERESTED in early modern as and readers, asking whether studies has a future in that field seems like an odd question. Speaking for those involved in the study early modern writers, I would happily argue that study, in one sense, is the future for the field: it reopens and revitalizes not only the issues involved in gender, genre, and authorship, but also the material practices reading and writing in a period in which one had competing textual modes with which to find an audience, shape an identity, or preserve text. As Peter Beal observes in his opening ruminations, asking this sort question in the 1970s or even the 1980s would have caused some amusement, if not outright derision, if women writers was added to the phrase manuscript First all, everyone, feminists and traditionalists alike, that there were only four or five real before the novelists mercifully appeared in the nineteenth century. Most them were apparently named either Mary or Elizabeth and almost all whom were autodidactic, eccentric aristocrats, with the exception Katherine Phillips whose career was used to classify her as a modest, trembling coterie writer, afraid to publish, whose sentimental French-style lyrics are damned with faint praise for its attenuated prettiness in anthologies for American undergraduates. We knew this because compelling narratives early modern women's lives had been imagined by Virginia Woolf and subsequent generations critics and these stories were seemingly supported by the dearth listed in scholarly bibliographies, catalogs, anthologies, and literary histories the early modern period. You would look in vain, for example, in catalogs collections for women's names, but if you were lucky (or experienced), you might sense their presence under headings such as family of or papers. When the odd in a feminine hand was uncovered, it could be explained away: it was a copy someone else's work, it was not really literature, and/or it just wasn't any good. Even when, thanks to the pioneering works mentioned by Peter Beal--by himself, Hobbs, Marotti, and others--manuscript studies and the ways and means transmission began to be valued as a field worthy study in and itself, there remained often a curious, polite gender segregation. For obvious reasons, much the exciting earlier work was done on canonical major literary figures, who, for equally obvious reasons, were men. This had the beneficial effect attracting wider serious critical attention to issues--Shakespeare, Donne, Herbert, and Sidney have immediate name recognition because they are indisputably key figures in our analyses the larger literary issues their times, while one suspects that comparable studies using Gertrude Thimelby or Mary Carey's domestically produced texts would have sunk like soggy paper, rippleless. Women contemporaries Donne, Sidney, or Shakespeare (usually relatives, even imaginary ones on occasion) often occupied at best some paragraphs as a forlorn group--women's manuscripts and the stigma print--or were again simply absent from the majority these types studies. Those working on women's manuscripts in the 1980s and 1990s felt obliged to cite the models based on men's texts--even though the creation and circulation manuscripts from Donne and his circle or those produced commercially by scribes for patrons or for more general distribution might have little in common with the domestic production texts by women--the opposite was often not practiced. …
Publication Year: 2004
Publication Date: 2004-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
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