Introduction

Summary

It is particularly satisfying that this volume should be one of the first in the new series on Manuscript Culture in the British Isles. The central issue with which it deals, the transition from manuscript to print, is well studied in terms of its relation to contemporary events in Britain, especially the rise of Protestantism and the absorption of influences and ideas from the Italian Renaissance. However, it is only in recent decades that the issue of gender, and its importance in inflecting the impact of these great movements of cultural transformation, have been addressed. Since Joan Kelly famously asked whether women actually had a Renaissance, the early-modern household has sometimes been represented as a male-dominated sphere, in which book-ownership, writing and reading were centred on husbands and fathers, and books for women were restricted to conduct books. In marked contrast, late-medieval women have been studied as owners and users of books and especially of the largest category of luxury book, the books of hours; and the libraries and catalogues of medieval female communities such as Syon and Wilton have also received much attention. It is thus appropriate to argue that the impact of printing should also be considered as a gendered issue.

Does this then suggest that textual production experienced something of the same transformational effects as occupations such as brewing and weaving, in which women, previously dominant and skilled producers, were marginalized by processes of professionalization and industrialization? The introduction of the printing press certainly makes this an attractive hypothesis, at least at first sight; but can cultural production so simply be compared with other industries? Moreover, such an argument would ignore the fact that access to the institutions of higher education, especially the universities, was no more restricted in the early-modern period than in the medieval; the universities simply remained closed to women. This exclusion was central to the processes which not only made it impossible for women to be scholars but also made it extremely difficult for them to achieve recognition as authors.

The ongoing effects of these exclusions are visible in the structure and contents of even the most recent and inclusive textbooks on the Renaissance and on literary production across the period from the fourteenth to the seventeenth century.