Rethinking and Re-viewing Data

Abstract

• The three projects we describe here seek to expand the ways in which we understand women’s relationships with texts by theorizing and applying robust methodologies to the study of early modern women’s book ownership, eighteenthcentury women’s libraries, and women’s compilation of manuscript verse miscellanies. This work challenges assumptions and biases in book history—in particular, the perceived absence of evidence in terms of both the texts themselves and the textual and intellectual labor involved in their production. One of the most exciting aspects of women’s book history is the variety and scope of “new” source materials hiding in plain sight in libraries and archives around the world. Although many of these items remain inaccessible to scholars for various practical reasons (location, time, and funds are always factors), often the primary barrier is conceptual: the simple perception of a lack of evidence. In fact, we have found plenty of material when searching for women-created manuscript verse miscellanies and the records of women’s libraries and book ownership. The sheer numbers of manuscript or textual witnesses involved have, however, made it difficult to assess and analyze the material. We have all struggled with the problem of genre, because of both the lack of defining conceptual parameters and the idiosyncrasies of surviving witnesses. Each of our studies aims, therefore, to make some of these “new” forms of contemporary evidence accessible to more systematic study and interpretation. Such data-driven work has the potential to transform histories of reading. Like many of our colleagues in this special issue, we believe that careful framing and processing of the quantitative data is a necessary groundwork for qualitative analyses. This calls for preliminary theorizing and categorizing. We have found ourselves