Women and the Book Trade in Sixteenth-Century France.

Susan M. Broomhall. Women and the Book Trade in Sixteenth-Century France.

Women and Gender in the Early Modern World. Aldershot and Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2002. viii + 282 pp. index. append. bibl. $69.95. ISBN: 0-7546-0671-6.

This book will be of interest to historians of early modern women. Broomhall has compiled extensive data about women's involvement in publication, and she uses it to develop an analysis that moves beyond a narrow focus on women writers, exploring the contexts and material conditions that shaped women's contact with what Broomhall calls "publication culture."

Broomhall works from a broad concept of women as writers--including consideration of writings, such as inscriptions, that do not aim at public authorship but nevertheless represent a means of communication. Similarly, she incorporates women's various activities relating to the book trade, whether as producers or consumers. Opening with a discussion of women as readers and owners of books, she moves on to examine their roles in book production and publishing before turning her attention to the activities of women as writers. She argues that women, although severely marginalized, exercised purposeful strategies to gain access to publishing, taking advantage of the new opportunities offered by print.

Some of Broomhall's findings will be familiar to historians. For example, the tendency of women writers to acknowledge their sex as an impediment to authorial status has been observed frequently, as have the ways in which gendered authority operated to place women outside the "canon." In a number of areas, however, Broomhall brings new light to bear. Her most original contributions appear in the section on "Strategies of Female Publication," dealing with, first, the ways in which geography and social place affected patterns of women's authorship, and, second, women's rhetorical uses of familial relations to lend greater authority to their publications.

Comparing publication patterns of the dominant Parisian press with provincial and southern productions, Broomhall argues that, in proportion to their smaller scale, regional presses offered relatively greater opportunities to women than the Parisian center. She suggests that women could gain greater freedom of expression through distance (either social or geographical) from the restrictively conventional Parisian court, or by drawing on distinctive regional cultures that could endorse women's self-assertion.

In her analysis of women's rhetorical strategies, Broomhall argues that they increasingly used familial relationships to bolster their claims to an authorial voice in the last quarter of the sixteenth century. She traces women's evocation of maternal, filial, and fraternal bonds, suggesting that women were responding to the greater focus on family life current in post-Reformation thinking, but also exploiting this concern for their own purposes to justify publication.

Broomhall offers adjustments to common views in some other areas as well. Her survey of women's activities in the book trade raises doubt about the idea that printing as a trade was more open and/or more liberating to women than other artisanal occupations. She also emphasizes the commonly "public" aspects of both manuscript circulation and print, arguing that women could face similar obstacles to authorial voice in both.

As an appendix to her study, Broomhall has compiled a valuable checklist of printed editions of French women's writings from 1485 to 1599, including not only whole works published by women, but also women's contributions to works by others. Unfortunately, the poor editing of this book is a real distraction. Errors confront the reader in an unremitting stream, from the kinds of misspellings and grammatical lapses that plague undergraduate papers to the repetition of whole blocks of text a few pages after their first appearance. The book also could have used help in organization and clarity of argument. The public deserves better than this from both authors and publishers.

Nevertheless, Broomhall's findings on women's strategies for textual self-assertion and on the sociocultural geography of women's publication make a new contribution, and her bibliographic work provides much raw material for other scholars to explore.

JOY WILTENBURG

Rowan University