Manuscript and Women’s Life Writing

Abstract

Most women’s life writing of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was written in manuscript and often circulated (or “published”) in manuscript; it rarely found its way into print in a writer’s lifetime. Consequently, scholars must often consider a manuscript’s material condition, as well as the material circumstances of the manuscript’s production, when analyzing a woman’s life writing. This entry surveys the most significant aspects of early modern manuscript culture that are applicable to women’s life writing of this period: multiplicity, open-endedness, community production, writing as textual accounting, and materiality. Approaching women’s manuscripts with these ideas in mind helps to illuminate the authors’ complex relationships with reading, writing, the communities in which they lived and wrote, and the cultural mandates that (not always successfully) dictated certain forms of selfhood. Such study also supports a more nuanced and realistic understanding of early modern women and their intellectual production than reading only print publications from the period can do. Put simply, women actively engaged with their own and others’ texts in their construction—and reconstruction—of self and others in their manuscript life writing.