Women and the Book Trade in Sixteenth-Century France

Susan BROOMHALL

Ashgate, July 2002, Hardback, 209pp. ISBN 0754606716.

Focusing on how women participated in the book trades as patrons, copyists, illuminators, publishers, editors and readers, as well as their more widely studied involvement as authors, this text foregrounds contributions made by women during a period of profound transformation in the modes and meanings of publication. Broomhall broadens her discussion of the concept of publication to include methods of scribal publication, through the circulation and presentation of manuscripts, and expands notions of authorship to incorporate a wide sample group of female writers and publishing experiences. The work also presents a checklist of all known women’s writings in printed texts between 1488 and 1599.


Contents :
Introduction
  • Contexts of female publication
– Women’s experiences as readers, owners and collectors of books
– Women working in the book trades
– Women publishing: theoretical and practical contexts
– Female Authors in print:the struggle for textual control
  • Strategies of female publication
– Dynamic boundaries: social status, geography and gender in publication
– Domestic speech: rhetorical strategies of family and household
– In the margins: gender, textual relation and location
Conclusions
Appendix: A checklist of first and significant editions
Bibliography
Index.