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Women's Reading Habits and Gendered Genres, C.1600 – 1700

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Women's Reading Habits and Gendered Genres, C.1600 – 1700 Women’s Reading Habits and Gendered Genres, c.1600 – 1700 Hannah Jeans PhD University of York History July 2019 Abstract The history of early modern reading has long been based on narratives of long-term change, tracing the move from scholarly, humanist reading habits to the leisured reading of the eighteenth century. These narratives are normatively masculine, and leave little room for women and non-elite men. The studies of women readers that have emerged have largely been based on case studies of exceptional women. This thesis, then, provides the first diachonic study of women’s reading habits in the seventeenth century, offering a fresh perspective on the chronology of early modern reading. This encompasses an exploration of women’s participatio n in certain reading habits or cultures, such as ‘active reading’ methods and the rise of news culture. Moreover, there is an examination of the connections between reading and gender. This thesis proposes that reading was often used as a signifier of gender, and that by discussing their reading women entered into a discourse about femininity and identity. The sources, drawn largely from archival research across the UK and the USA, are wide-ranging, and piece together examples of reading, and representations thereof, from a variety of different seventeenth-century Englishwomen. This is a both a recovery project, and a reimagining of the field, complicating chronologies and approaches common to previous studies of reading. Ultimately, this thesis investigates both the practice and act of reading, and the nature of the ‘woman reader’ herself. It argues that our categories of analysis need to be complicated and nuanced when discussing the history of both reading and women, and proposes that the ‘woman reader’ i s far more complex and varied than is often realised. This is a redacted version of this thesis. 2 Contents Abstract 2 List of Tables and Figures 5 Acknowledgements 6 Author’s Declaration 7 Introduction 8 Chapter One: Finding Women Readers 32 Annotations and Inscriptions 41 Letters and Life-Writing 49 Conclusion 52 Part One: Reading Habits, Practices and Cultures 56 Chapter Two: ‘Her Book’: Active Reading and Women’s Annotations 56 Annotation and Political Identity: Margaret Hoby and Anne Clifford 64 Marks of Life: Seventeenth- Century ‘Domestic Annotations 78 ‘Her Book’: Autograph Inscriptions 92 Conclusion 106 Chapter Three: Writing Reading: Commonplacing, Collecting and Collating Experiences of the Page 109 Sociality and Records of Life in Women’s Manuscript Notebooks 121 Recipe Books: Science, Medicine and Food in Manuscript Compilations 138 Conclusion 148 Chapter Four: ‘I harde yow once saye yow loved forryne newes’: Women as New s Readers 152 Letters of News 166 Manuscript Newsletters 179 3 Conclusion 196 Part Two: Gender, Genre, and Representations of Women’s Reading 199 Chapter Five: Cultural Views of Women Readers 199 Godly Advice Books 208 Mothers’ Legacies 218 Civil Instruction Manuals 222 Polemics and the Querelle des Femmes 236 Conclusion 242 Chapter Six: ‘She much delighted in that holy Book’: Women’s Religious Reading Habits 248 Habit a nd Joy: Women’s Devotional Reading 260 Beyond the Bible: Women Reading Theology 274 Conclusion 287 Chapter Seven: ‘Reading unprofitable romances’: Gender, Identity and the Romance Genre 289 Romances and Feminini ty in Women’s Life -Writing 298 Gender, Genre and the ‘Woman Reader’ 321 Conclusion 327 Reading Habits 328 Gendered Genres 330 Appendix I: List of Annotated Books Consulted 333 Appendix II: List of Manuscript Compilations and Notebooks Consulted 344 Appendix III: Part One Accompanying Images 349 Bibliography of Works Cited 356 4 List of Tables and Figures Tables 1 List of Annotated Books Consulted 333 2 List of Manuscript Compilations and Notebooks Consulted 344 Figures 1 Annotation in Weldon, The Court and Character of King James . 349 2 Annotation in Weldon, The Court and Character of King James 349 3 Annotations in Susanna Beckwith’s Bible 350 4 Inscription on D’Audiguier’s A Tragi-Comicall History 350 5 Inscription on Evelyn’s Publick Employment 351 6 Dedication from Frances Fitzherbert’s miscellany 352 7 Inscription in Francis Chom ondeley’s commonplace book 352 8 Page from Elizabeth L owther’s commonplace book 353 9 Title page from Sarah Hors ington’s Arcana 353 10 Newsletter to Madam Pole, December 1695 354 11 Newsletter to Madam Pole, June 1692 354 12 Newsletter to Madam Pole, May 1696 355 5 Acknowledgements This work was supported by the Arts & Humanities Research Council (grant number AH/L503848/1) through the White Rose College of the Arts & Humanities. WRoCAH also supported numerous research trips and conferences across several countries. I am also the grateful recipient of several fellowships, at University of York Humanities Research Centre, the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library and the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, and of travel grants from the Royal Historical Society, the James Jarvis Memorial Fund, and the Women’s Studies Group, 1558-1837. I would like to thank the staff at the Clark and the Beinecke Libraries for being so welcoming and helpful. The people I have met while conducting research trips and attending conferences are too numerous to name, but have all made this thesis much richer through their insightful questions, and generosity in letting me air my thoughts and ideas. The History department at the University of York, not only during my PhD but through my undergraduate and Masters degrees, has been open and supportive. Many, many thanks are owed to my supervisor, Mark Jenner, for his patience, support, suggestions, and for helping me come up with this project in the first place. He has been unfailingly encouraging and generous with his time. Thanks also to Helen Smith and Sophie Weeks, as members of my thesis advisory panel, for all their detailed and constructive feedback. Fiona Hobbs Milne, Helen Thompson, and Nick Jeans have all been much-appreciated proofreaders. Thanks are due to Fiona Hobbs Milne, Tom Sissons, Sky Duthie, and Roisin Jacklin, and all my family, for their support. 6 Author’s Declaration I declare that this thesis is a presentation of original work and I am the sole author. This work has not previously been presented for an award at this, or any other, University. A ll s ources are acknowledged as r eferences. 7 Introduction In her autobiography, Lucy Hutchinson (1620-1681), the parliamentarian poet and biographer, wrote that at seven years old, My genius was quite averse from all but my booke, and […] I was so eager of th at my mother, thinking it prejudic’d my health, would moderate me in it; yet this rather animated me than kept me back, and every moment I could steale from my play I would employ in any booke I could find, when my own were lockt up from me. After dinner a nd supper I had still an hower allow’d me to play, and then I would steale into some hole or other to read[.] 1 Hutchinson clearly loved reading, preferring to spend time with her books than playing, even at such a young age. Her mother worried about the effects of this reading, imagining it to have a physiological impact. She therefore tried to ‘moderate’ her daughter’s habits, although Hutchinson was persistent, reading other books in the house when her own were kept from her. Despite not mentioning the texts she read, this passage gives us a valuable insight into reading and women in the seventeenth century, hinting at many themes such as the perceived harmful effects of reading, the spaces and places of reading, and the shared ownership and use of books within the home. 2 Hut chinson’s books were ‘lockt up,’ physically kept away from her, but she did have access to others in the house. Moreover, she would frequently use her leisure time in the evenings to ‘steale into some hole’ to read, demonstrating the co vert nature of her 1 Lucy Hutchinson, Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson, with the fragment of an autobiography of Mrs Hutchinson , ed. James Sutherland (London: Oxford University Press, 1973), 288. 2 Hutchinson’s reading and intellectual influences have been explored in a range of articles, drawing on her poetic and biographical works. See, for example, Jerome de Groot, “John Denham and Lucy Hutchinson’s Commonplace Book,” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 48, no. 1, the English Renaissance (2008): 147-163; Elizabeth Scott-Baumann, Forms of Engagement: Women, Poetry, and Culture 1640-1680 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); David Norbrook, “Lucy Hutchinson: Theology, Gender and T ranslation,” The Seventeenth Century 30, no.2 (2015): 139-162. 8 habits. The text indicates both some early modern attitudes towards women reading, and the lived experience of women readers. Reading has long been recognised as historically variable. Each act of reading has a relationship with the culture in which it is undertaken. 3 It is therefore of great interest to historians and literary scholars alike although, as Robert Darnton has noted, ‘we have not yet devised a strategy for understanding the inner process by which readers made sense of words .’ 4 Instead, we must look at the traces that do remain: the practices surrounding reading, where it took place, and the records of reading events. Interest in the history of reading has steadily increased since the 1980s, when Darnton suggested a move from the history of the book to the history of reading. 5 Writing nearly thirty years after he initially penned the article, Darnton commented that ‘the “First Steps” toward a history of reading that I described in AJFS twenty-eight years ago have now turned into something of a stampede.’ 6 In this latter article, Darnton identified two main approaches to the history of reading: micro- and macro-analysis.
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