Women and the Book Trade in Sixteenth-Century France

Focusing on the vastly understudied area of how women participated in the book trades, not just as authors, but also as patrons, copyists, illuminators, publishers, editors and readers, Women and the Book Trade in Sixteenth-Century France foregrounds contributions made by women during a period of profound transformation in the modes and understanding of publication. Innovatively, Broomhall here broadens 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 presents the only checklist of all known women's writings in printed texts between 1488 and 1599. Women and the Book Trade in Sixteenth-Century France constitutes the most comprehensive assessment of women's contribution to contemporary publishing yet available. It is of interest not only to book historians and French historians, but also to a broad range of scholars who work with other European literatures and histories, and/or women's studies.

Susan Broomhall is an Australian Research Council Post-doctoral Fellow in the Department of History, The University of Western Australia. She has published on early modern women in the Sixteenth Century Journal, Social History of Medicine, Nottingham French Studies, Parergon amongst others and her second monograph Gender and Medical Knowledge in Early Modern France is forthcoming from Manchester University Press. She is currently working on a modern edition of the Le Verger Fertile des Vertus and a history of women in sixteenth-century France with Colette H. Winn, a study of the correspondence of the daughters of Guillaume d'Orange, and a monograph entitled Writing Convent Life in Sixteenth-Century France: The Abbey of Beaumont-Lès-Tours

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; The struggle for textual control: Female authors in print; 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.