Some error occured while loading the Quick View. Please close the Quick View and try reloading the page.
This ambitious and interdisciplinary book redraws the history of early modern Englishwomen’s reading, exploring the connections between gender, reading habits and genre throughout the seventeenth century. It challenges accepted historiographical narratives about reading that have privileged male experience and the impact of the Civil War, and highlights the multiplicity and complexity of women’s reading practices, focusing on the ways in which they used reading in constructing their gender identity. Reading was a gendered act in the early modern period; in reading certain genres, women were negotiating a range of gendered behavioural norms. From religious texts, romances and cookbooks, to news, scientific and medical treatises, and household records, this book draws on archival sources across a wide range of writing types to offer a more complete picture of women’s reading experiences, ultimately questioning the accepted notion of ‘the woman reader’ itself.
Jeans’ text expands the field of the construction of early modern gender identity with new ways of looking at… evidence. In her work on re-reading, we are invited to consider the nuances and facets of the early modern woman reader in a way that scholarship has thus far not given space to… and places her work well within a field that has thus far not exposed the complexity of women’s readership and of reading as a way of performing the construction of identity.
—Helena Hoyle King, PhD University of Bristol, UK
- Introduction
- 1 ‘She much delighted in that holy Book’: Women’s Religious Reading Habits
- 2 ‘Reading unprofitable romances’: Gender, Identity and the Romance Genre
- 3 ‘I harde yow once saye yow loved forryne newes’: Women News Readers
- 4 Women Reading Science and Philosophy: Medical, Culinary and Philosophical Knowledge
- 5 (Re)Reading and Record Keeping
- Conclusion