2 - Reading women

Summary

Reading was a vital way for early modern women to engage with the culture of early modern Britain. As a socially stratified skill, learned first with print, then handwriting and finally Latin, reading could be attempted with the particular literacy skills available to individuals. Reading was charged with instilling religious doctrine and political ideology, even as it could become an agent of social change. In both print and manuscript culture, reading modulated with social, technological and economic shifts in textual production and circulation. Undertaken in silence and aloud, reading had private and public dimensions, psychological and cultural consequences and a physiology. It was also a deeply gendered activity, not because women necessarily read in ways essentially different from men, but because access to education and wealth, along with the belief that women's bodies and minds were designed by God for a domestic life, informed how, why and what women read. Evidence of women's reading is somewhat elusive. Because women were much less likely than men to create marginalia, it is difficult to trace their reading practices in the way that Lisa Jardine and Anthony Grafton, William Sherman, and Kevin Sharpe have done with Gabriel Harvey, John Dee and William Drake. This problem of evidence characterizes the study of all non-élite readers, although the moral value accorded female silence created an especially feminine reluctance to annotate books. A book's margins were not necessarily a private space, since books were often shared, and women did not tend to assume that they had the authority to render a comment. Even more, women were less likely than men to be literate.