Do manuscript studies have a future in early modern women studies?

FOR THOSE INTERESTED in early modern women as writers and readers, asking whether manuscript studies has a future in that field seems like an odd question. Speaking for those involved in the study of early modern women writers, I would happily argue that manuscript study, in one sense, is the future for the field: it reopens and revitalizes not only the issues involved in gender, genre, and authorship, but also the material practices of reading and writing in a period in which one had competing textual modes with which to find an audience, shape an identity, or preserve text.

As Peter Beal observes in his opening ruminations, asking this sort of question in the 1970s or even the 1980s would have caused some amusement, if not outright derision, if "women writers" was added to the phrase "manuscript studies." First of all, everyone, feminists and traditionalists alike, knew that there were only four or five "real" women writers before the novelists mercifully appeared in the nineteenth century. Most of them were apparently named either Mary or Elizabeth and almost all of whom were autodidactic, eccentric aristocrats, with the exception of Katherine Phillips whose manuscript career was used to classify her as a modest, trembling "coterie" writer, afraid to publish, whose sentimental French-style lyrics are damned with faint praise for its "attenuated prettiness" in anthologies for American undergraduates. We "knew" this because compelling narratives of early modern women's lives had been imagined by Virginia Woolf and subsequent generations of critics and these stories were seemingly supported by the dearth of women writers listed in scholarly bibliographies, catalogs, anthologies, and literary histories of the early modern period. You would look in vain, for example, in catalogs of manuscript collections for women's names, but if you were lucky (or experienced), you might sense their presence under headings such as "family of" or "domestic papers." When the odd manuscript in a feminine hand was uncovered, it could be explained away: it was a copy of someone else's work, it was not really "literature," and/or it just "wasn't any good."

Even when, thanks to the pioneering works mentioned by Peter Beal--by himself, Hobbs, Marotti, and others--manuscript studies and the ways and means of manuscript transmission began to be valued as a field worthy of study in and of itself, there remained often a curious, polite gender segregation. For obvious reasons, much of the exciting earlier work was done on canonical "major" literary figures, who, for equally obvious reasons, were men. This had the beneficial effect of attracting wider serious critical attention to manuscript issues--Shakespeare, Donne, Herbert, and Sidney have immediate "name recognition" because they are indisputably key figures in our analyses of the larger literary issues of their times, while one suspects that comparable studies using Gertrude Thimelby or Mary Carey's domestically produced manuscript texts would have sunk like soggy paper, rippleless. Women contemporaries of Donne, Sidney, or Shakespeare (usually relatives, even imaginary ones on occasion) often occupied at best some paragraphs as a forlorn group--women's manuscripts and the stigma of print--or were again simply absent from the majority of these types of studies. Those working on women's manuscripts in the 1980s and 1990s felt obliged to cite the models based on men's texts--even though the creation and circulation of manuscripts from Donne and his circle or those produced commercially by scribes for patrons or for more general distribution might have little in common with the domestic production of texts by women--the opposite was often not practiced.

Thus, those working on women's manuscript texts well into the 1990s found themselves still having to explain who and what they worked on long after manuscript studies became, in Peter Beal's words, in danger of being "fashionable." This began to change with the appearance of anthologies such as Germaine Greer's Kissing the Rod, which made use of manuscript sources in its entries, even though more concerned with issues involving women and print. It took nearly twenty years after the Index was begun, however, for the Perdita Project to give those interested in women writers the type of research tools to know where such manuscript materials could even be found. In terms of poetry alone, one only has to look at Jane Stevenson and Peter Davidson's Early Modern Women Poets: An Anthology (2001) in comparison to the first Norton anthology of women's writing to see the way in which manuscript studies has forever altered the "landscape" of early modern women's literary history, and invited a re-visioning of many of the larger issues involved in mapping literary histories in general.

Indeed, I would hope that, with the new electornic resources available for identifying and cataloging women's manuscripts, we might continue to ask ourselves whether the models established in the 1970s and 1980s in the discussions of men's literary manuscripts--social circles formed at the universities and inns of court, the activities of professional scribes producing commercial manuscript texts--are really the only ones we wish to apply to this type of material, much of which has never before been in the critical eye. Such recovery efforts to locate and document women's manuscript texts have revealed not only numerous new names for students of manuscript culture to investigate, but have also made it clear what a rich abundance of texts exists, written by women of the lower and middle classes as well as the fine ladies. They have drawn attention to the roles played by women in creating, preserving, and transmitting manuscript texts, outside of the conventional spaces of public social groups and commercial enterprises, thus inviting further work on the history of early modern authorship in general. Finally, they have drawn further attention to the ways in which existing definitions of literary genres do not always seem to work well when discussing manuscript texts.

For the future of manuscript studies and women's texts, I would like to see it challenge strenuously the rapidly developing "history of the book" trade, which seems to define "book" only as a printed object and the laws and mechanics of its production as the most important element shaping authorial identity and textual practice, whether male or female. Likewise, the combination of women's studies and manuscript studies usefully complicates our received notions of how "literature" is defined, classified, and packaged in anthologies and teaching texts for study and use in the classroom. Furthermore, I hope it continues to challenge our notions of gender politics in periods other than our own, while usefully drawing our attention to the gender politics of scholarship and critical inquiry in any age.