The prohibitions that helped define girls’ and women’s reading between 1500 and 1800 in Europe and America were nearly always founded on cultural attitudes that cast reading as powerful and potentially transformative. Sometimes, particularly in matters of religious controversy, this power was centered on the soul. Two laws enacted a century and an ocean apart reached opposite conclusions about women’s appropriate relationship to the Bible, but they depended equally on the assumption that access to the English Bible was a critical matter of the soul. The 1543 Act for the Advancement of True Religion under Henry VIII criminalized the reading...

This essay uses two contrasting stereotypes of the woman reader-consumer to explore the intermingling of appetites for romances, for sexual gratification, and for the consumption of luxury goods as described in the late sixteenth century. At opposite extremes as consumers, John Lyly’s “gentlewoman reader” and Philip Stubbes’s pious Katherine make visible a volatile mixture of cultural prohibitions and personal pleasures gendered as female yet also incorporating issues beyond those of gender. Within the ideologies of emergent capitalism, the reading of romances by women implied not only leisure time and culpable idleness but also the economic wherewithal to buy books of...

In the context of early modern women’s reading, gender is a surprisingly problematic category of critical analysis—both definitive and reductive, enabling and restricting. The example of women reading Shakespeare in Caroline England (1625–49) is a pertinent example: if on the one hand we can observe practices of “engendering” in rhetorical constructions of women’s reading of Shakespeare, on the other hand the scattered traces of early modern women’s reading not only counter such practices but, crucially, also prompt questions about what it means to understand their reading under the organizing rubric of gender. This is not to ignore or...

“I read constantly and find it teaching,” Hannah Heaton confided in a diary that spanned the last forty years of the eighteenth century. Heaton most assuredly did as she claimed, keeping a daily schedule that took this resident of rural Connecticut from the Bible to the meditations of John Bunyan to the treatises of Thomas Shepard, Solomon Stoddard, and Michael Wigglesworth. Born in 1788 and an ardent reader from an early age, Sarah Josepha Hale read with the same constancy. However, Hale devoted herself to secular literature, which she embraced with the passion that Heaton reserved for Bibles, psalm books,...

In countless literary and pictorial representations, the woman who reads reads alone. Poring over books, engrossed in letters, these solitary readers embody the seamless fusion of subject and text; they seem to have escaped into some unreachable, interior imaginative space. Despite the potency of these images, much of women’s reading, like men’s reading, was neither solitary nor private. Instead, as scholars have discovered, reading regularly took place in explicitly social, even sociable, contexts. Just as important, even when women read silently and privately, they often did so with social aims in mind. Reading was surely intended to inculcate virtues that...

Midway through Thomas Heywood’s 1608 play, The Rape of Lucrece: A True Roman Tragedie, the drama’s antagonist, Sextus Tarquin, describes the challenges to wives’ chastity while their husbands are at war:

. . . ist possible thinke you, that women of young spirit and full age

Of fluent wit, that can both sing and dance,

Reade, write, such as feede well and taste choice cates,

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Can such as these their husbands being away

Emploid in forreine sieges or elsewhere,

Deny...

Death by classics? For twenty-year-old Eliza Lucas (c. 1722–93), who presided over a prosperous indigo plantation in colonial South Carolina, the idea seemed ludicrous. An avid reader of Plutarch’s Lives, she scoffed at the warnings of an older woman from the neighborhood, who advised her that rising at 5 A.M. to read Plutarch would send her to an early grave—or worse, wrinkle her skin and “spoil” her marriage. After narrowly preventing the older woman from hurling the toxic text into the fireplace, Lucas cheerfully polished it off and then begged a male friend to send her some Virgil....

In 1789 students at the Bethlehem Female Seminary, arguably America’s most prestigious school for girls, concluded their first public examination with a “dialogue in verse” that summed up their educations. Standing before trustees and town dignitaries, ten speakers enumerated the different branches of their learning, citing the “uses and delights” of each. Not surprisingly, the students first praised reading, which deepened a young woman’s connections to an intimate circle of family and friends, connected her to a larger world, and anchored her in the wisdom of the “Holy Scriptures.” The girls also described their accomplishments: vocal and instrumental music, which...

As the essays earlier in the collection suggest, reading is embedded in a range of social, textual, and material practices, and readers survive in the historical record only when some form of textual or visual production accompanied or followed their reading. Reading on its own, in other words, is invisible. In this final section of the volume the essays focus on textual production of various sorts: storytelling, testifying, translation, transcription, composition. Even as they attend to production in these various forms, this final cluster of essays affirms the connections between reading, speaking, listening, interpreting, and writing.

As the essays in...

Popular Western stereotypes of female storytellers change remarkably when studied over the three centuries from 1500 to 1800. One of the most prevalent images of the female narrator before 1500, in the late medieval period, is memorably typified by Chaucer’s Wife of Bath. The Wife is loud, forceful and bawdy; she reeks of sexual pleasure. By 1800, at the end of the period covered by this volume, the female narrator tends to be imagined as someone closer to Jane Austen—outwardly demure and proper, hiding her manuscript when visitors come to call lest her unladylike scribbling give offense.¹ Both stereotypes...

Throughout the trauma of captivity, Mary Rowlandson built her comfort on her Bible: it was at once sacred text and solacing icon, her “Guid by day,” her “Pillow by night.” In this reliance on Scripture, Rowlandson practiced the fundamental devotional act of her community. Protestantism has often been called a religion of the book; nowhere was this truer than in Puritan America, where reading the Bible was not only the legislated obligation but also the deepest desire of every believer. The union of Sola Fides and Sola Scriptura—the spiritual autonomy enabled by a new emphasis on experimental faith and...

“Translation,” Eve Sanders has written, “carved out an intermediary zone between reading and writing in which it was possible for [some early modern women] to claim position as [authors].”¹ I want to explore the intermediary zone that Sanders identifies in order to consider translation not only as a textual field in which we can discern traces of female authorship but also as a significant resource for students of the history of reading. Translation is often devalued in ideological schemes that privilege some kind of original creation and ownership of one’s own literary property. Such schemes are already evident in early...

Indian arrowheads and hatchets from Philadelphia’s outlying pastures; an ancient iron coat of mail unearthed along the Susquehanna River banks; a sliver of William Penn’s door frame at Pennsbury; a relic box comprised of wood fragments from Columbus’s house in Haiti and from the mythical Treaty Elm under which Penn negotiated with the Lenape Indians; a bundle of Cherokee newspapers resisting Andrew Jackson’s Indian removal policies; a transfer print of Nicolas Scull and George Heap’s 1752 map of Philadelphia on white satin; a newspaper clipping recounting the oddity of Siamese twins; another announcing the October 1835 reappearance of Halley’s comet...

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...