On December 8, 2022, the Huizinga Research Network Women Writers in History organizes a mini-symposium on digital approaches to women’s book culture. During this symposium, we will interrogate how digital tools can help scholars reconstruct women’s interactions with the written word in the early modern period. Moving beyond women’s writing alone, we consider various facets of women’s authorly identities, including their roles as collectors and book buyers, constructions of female scholarly identities, and the circulation of female-authored texts across both public and ‘private’ networks and forms of sociability. The afternoon will include presentations by PhD researchers, and will be closed with a keynote address by prof. dr. Marie-Louise Coolahan (NUI Galway), PI of the ERC-funded RECIRC project and database (RECIRC: The Reception and Circulation of Early Modern Women’s Writing, 1550 – 1700).
The symposium will take place at Radboud University Nijmegen, in Huize Heyendael (Titus Brandsmakamer/Marijnenkamer). Address: Geert Grooteplein Noord 9, Nijmegen.
Register before December 1 at huizinga@uu.nl
Programme
13.00 – 13.15h Entrance
13.15 – 13.30h Introduction
13.30 – 15.00h PhD session 1
15.00 – 15.30h Coffee Break
15.30 – 16.30h PhD session 2
16.30 – 17.00h Coffee Break + change of rooms
17.00 – 18.00h Keynote Lecture Marie-Louise Coolahan (NUI Galway)
- PhD-session 1 (3 papers of 15 minutes + responses and discussion of 15 minutes)
Holly Riach, ‘The Authorial Agency of the Female Copyist-Compiler’
Joanna Rozendaal, ‘Forgotten Poetesses and Bestselling Authoresses: Women’s Book Possessions Compared’
Anna-Rose Shack, ‘“To all eternity I’ll sing / In unknown lays”: the Sound of Hester Pulter’s Poems’
- PhD-session 2 (2 papers of 15 minutes + responses and discussion of 15 minutes)
Koen Scholten, ‘The Alterity of Female Scholars in the Early Modern World of Learning’
Fauve Vandenberghe, ‘Rolling Stylometry and Collaborative Authorship in The Cry (1754)’
- Keynote Lecture
Marie-Louise Coolahan, ‘Patterns, Outliers, and Teasers: Questions and Challenges for the Reception of Early Modern Women’s Writing’
Abstracts
Marie-Louise Coolahan, ‘Patterns, Outliers, and Teasers: Questions and Challenges for the Reception of Early Modern Women’s Writing’
This talk will present the ‘big-picture’ findings emerging from the ERC-funded project, RECIRC: The Reception and Circulation of Early Modern Women’s Writing, 1550-1700 (https://recirc.nuigalway.ie). This project explores a series of questions that arise in the course of evaluating women’s writing at scale: how did texts by women circulate? Who read them? How were they read, appropriated, or adapted? The project’s primary aim has been to move beyond case studies in order to provide a large-scale, quantitative analysis of these issues. This talk will introduce RECIRC’s open-access database and present results that illuminate the most commonly circulated genres and patterns of widespread circulation. It will show how such patterns throw up new research questions that often determine a return to close-reading techniques. Ultimately, then, it argues for the value of at-scale analysis as a combination of quantitative with qualitative approaches.
Holly Riach, ‘The Authorial Agency of the Female Copyist-Compiler’
In the early modern period, the production of texts tended to be a collaborative affair involving a plethora of players, from those involved in the initial stages of production, to those acting as transmitters and compilers. Digital databases such as RECIRC are invaluable resources for locating those women who encounter texts at a later stage of production, as readers who own, copy, or compile text into their own books. Bringing female book compilers and owners to the fore, this paper investigates how women actively engaged with the texts they read. By exploring the methods through which compilers selected and copied texts into their books, I conceive a form of authorship rooted in reader response. Ultimately, I argue that textual compilers possessed authorial agency through their attention to form: the transcription, reorganization, and subsequent recontextualization of texts. Narrowing in on the verse miscellany of Constance Aston Fowler (c.1621-1664), in which she compiles and transcribes the literary works of her family and friends, among others, this paper seeks to ascribe authorial agency to early modern women not yet regarded as authors.
Joanna Rozendaal, ‘Forgotten Poetesses and Bestselling Authoresses: Women’s Book Possessions Compared’
The fully digitised archives of the publishing house and bookseller’s firm Luchtmans offer a wealth of information on the eighteenth-century book market in Leiden. While the academic profile of the firm could have diminished the number of female clients, some 175 women did visit Luchtmans’ bookstore over the course of a century and a half, freely buying the literature of their liking. The MEDIATE-project provides us with a view on the other side of the spectrum: women’s libraries being sold. It comprises data from over 600 private book collections sold at auction between 1665 and 1830, including thousands of books formerly owned by women. As the enrichment of data regarding female book collections is nearing completion, it is time to take stock of the results. This paper will zoom in on works of female authors that were either bought by women at Luchtmans, or sold from their collections at book auctions. It will explore the general trends in female authorship and book acquisition, but most importantly, it will concentrate on the discrepancies, the ‘odd ones out’, and show how they give us a better understanding of both the individuality of book ownership, and the dangers of data bias.
Koen Scholten, ‘The Alterity of Female Scholars in the Early Modern World of Learning’
The tradition of collective life-writing such as Petrarch’s De viris illustribus (On Illustrious Men) traditionally focused on the lives of pre-eminent men, especially rulers, emperors, princes, and military leaders. Giovanni Boccaccio’s De mulieribus claris (On Bright Women), composed between 1361 and 1362 departed from that tradition and became increasingly popular, as evidenced by many fifteenth- and sixteenth-century men who compiled the lives of ‘bright women’.
This paper looks at the language used to describe learned women in Johannes Textor Ravisius’s (1470–1542) De memorabilibus et claris mulieribus (On Memorable and Bright Women, 1521). The discourse in Ravisius’s work reveals that women were not considered learned and erudite like their male counterparts. The archetypical ‘bright woman’ had her own set of virtues and collective history and male scholarly virtues such as erudition and innate brilliance were not attainable for female scholars. Through these processes of collective identity formation, women were excluded from participating as women in the learned world on an equal level with men.
Anna-Rose Shack, ‘“To all eternity I’ll sing / In unknown lays”: the Sound of Hester Pulter’s Poems’
Since the recovery of Hester Pulter’s 17th century manuscript in 1996, a wealth of scholarship on her lyric and emblem poems has emerged. In the last five years, Pulter scholarship has been considerably enhanced by The Pulter Project’s digitisation of her poetry. This international collaboration offers a palimpsestic layering of editorial approaches “to foreground the complexity of Pulter’s poetics and the affordances of scholarly editing in the digital age” (Wall and Knight). The project presents photographic facsimiles, transcriptions, lightly and substantively edited versions of the poems, and video and sound recordings via an elegant and user-friendly interface. This paper will focus in particular on the “soundings” section of The Pulter Project, highlighting how audio can be used to amplify understanding and increase the accessibility of early modern poetry both in terms of scholarly research and pedagogical practice. In light of the digital affordances of The Pulter Project, this paper will also reflect on Pulter’s own, somewhat ambivalent, textual perspective on the transmission of her poetry through time.
Fauve Vandenberghe, ‘Rolling Stylometry and Collaborative Authorship in The Cry (1754)’
The generically hybrid The Cry: A Dramatic Fable (1754) is thought to be a collaborative effort between Sarah Fielding (1710-1768) and Jane Collier (1714-1755). While initial evidence for this collaboration was mostly circumstantial—the two women moved in the same social circles and wrote prefaces for each other’s works—the recent discovery of Collier’s commonplace book provides more conclusive evidence: though veiled in anonymity, Collier reflects on the editing process of a collaborative work with another female author.
In this presentation, I will apply stylometric tools to The Cry using the “stylo” package in R in order to gain more insight into the collaborative nature of the novel. In particular, I analyze the text using “rolling” or sequential stylometry. Put simply, this means that the novel is divided into discrete text units, which are computationally compared to other literary texts by the two authors in question. By testing stylistic consistency and similarity to these other texts, we are able to attribute certain passages to one author or the other.
Applying basic stylometric tools to The Cry suggests that Fielding is the novel’s dominant author, with Collier primarily intervening during each chapter’s preface and prologue. While this does not fundamentally change our understanding of the novel, it does give an insight into what the editing process might have looked like. In using Collier’s and Fielding’s The Cry as a case study, I hope to reflect more widely on the limits and affordances of Digital Humanities tools to solve book historical concerns such as historical editing practices and women’s sociable and collaborative authorship.
Organisers:
Alicia Montoya alicia.montoya@ru.nl
Nina Geerdink n.geerdink@uu.nl
Feike Dietz f.m.dietz@uva.nl
Lieke van Deinsen lieke.vandeinsen@kuleuven.be