Patterns, Outliers, and Teasers: Questions and Challenges for the Reception of Early Modern Women’s Writing

Abstract

hich women writers were in circulation in the early modern period? Where did their texts go? And who read them? How were they read, used, or re-cycled? These are the questions driving the Reception and Circulation of Early Modern Women ’ s Writing, 1550 – 1700 (RECIRC) project. Funded by the European Research Council from 2014 to 2020, the project involved a team of researchers working to produce a big-picture view of the ways early modern readers engaged with women ’ s writing. 1 Since the seminal work of Lisa Jardine and Anthony Grafton on Gabriel Harvey ’ s reading practice, early modern scholars have expanded the physical spaces where reading occurred, taxonomized the signs of reading, explored marginalia and commonplacing as modes of reading, and opened up new ways of thinking about the oral and public dimensions of early modern reading. 2