‘There Are Numbers of Very Choice Books’*: Book Ownership and the Circulation of Women’s Texts, 1680–98

Coolahan, Marie‐Louise; Empey, Mark

doi:10.1057/978-1-137-54382-0_9

Cited by 6 publications

(3 citation statements)

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“…Contrary to many assumptions about Cavendish's reception, she was well‐known insofar as she was the most circulated British female author in Restoration advertisements aimed at those eager to supplement their personal libraries (Coolahan & Empey, 2016, pp. 139–157).…”

Section: Margaret Cavendish and Gabriel Danielmentioning

confidence: 99%

Berkeley's Gland Tour into Speculative Fiction Part 2: Margaret Cavendish and Berkeley's Attitudes Towards Women

Moriarty

Walters

2023

Philosophy Compass

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In Part 1, we explored how Berkeley drew from Homeric literature and used literary techniques such as satire to challenge his "freethinking" philosophical opponents in "The Pineal Gland" story published in The Guardian in 1713. Echoing the grand tours Berkeley undertook in subsequent years, Part 1 and 2 both present a "gland tour" of some motivations, influences and legacies of Berkeley's text. In particular, Part 2, explores a line of literary influence beginning with Margaret Cavendish and extending through Gabriel Daniel, Berkeley and Alexander Pope. In doing so, we present anticipations of features of Berkeley's story in the writings of Margaret Cavendish amid a discussion of Berkeley's complex attitudes towards women. The paper also argues that Berkeley's story represents an underappreciated yet significant milestone in the history of speculative fiction.

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Section: Margaret Cavendish and Gabriel Danielmentioning

confidence: 99%

Berkeley's Gland Tour into Speculative Fiction Part 2: Margaret Cavendish and Berkeley's Attitudes Towards Women

Moriarty

Walters

2023

Philosophy Compass

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“…Marie‐Louise Coolahan and Mark Empey, in “'There Are Numbers of Very Choice Books”:Book Ownership and the Circulation of Women's Texts, 1680–98,” study printed auction catalogs of 13 bibliophiles in the last two decades of the seventeenth century as a means of discovering patterns in how books by women's writers were collected (Coolahan & Empey, 2016). Emerging from the RECIRC project (Reception and Circulation of Early Modern Women's Writing, 1550–1700), their essay “participates in a shift away from recovery research toward interrogating women's place in literary history via the assessment of textual transmission and audience” (Coolahan, 2020, p. 140).…”

Section: History Of Readingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Women and the book in Britain's long eighteenth century

Levy

2020

Literature Compass

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This survey synthesizes and examines existing scholarship on women's practices and positions within eighteenth‐century British book culture. Since feminist scholarship began in the 1980s, the recovery of women's literary history has been largely focused on recovering their written contributions in print. However, more recently, eighteenth centuryists have noticed the interconnections between oral, written and print cultures; engaged in bibliographical studies on the significance of the expansion of print and the book trades; and considered how rising literacy rates and diverse reading practices shaped culture. Women, as writers and readers, and as intermediaries in the production and circulation of culture, played a critical role in shaping these developments. This essay reviews the considerable scholarship that addresses women's various engagements with book culture, research that collectively has generated a more capacious understanding of the history of books in the long eighteenth century and the women who produced, shared and read them.

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“…Of the thirty-seven women's collections they analyzed, only seven included books authored by women, and even there the proportions were low: between 1.25% and 7.69% of the total (the latter in a collection of only thirty-nine books). 13 While it may well be possible that these figures rose with the increased availability of works by women toward the end of the seventeenth century, reaching unprecedented levels during the eighteenth century, the data lending support to this claim remains fragmentary-despite suggestive case studies by scholars like Heissler, Alessa Johns, or Máire Kennedy. 14 We posit, then, that statements about women's preference for works by other women, as well as ideas regarding the gendered reception of works authored by women, need to be weighed carefully, since they sometimes seem to fit rather too easily into modern-day gender categories.…”

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confidence: 99%

Marketing Maria Sibylla Merian, 1720–1800: Book Auctions, Gender, and Reading Culture in the Dutch Republic

Montoya¹,

Jagersma²

2018

Book History

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On May 29, 1798, almost two years after the death of Clara Magdalena Dupeyrou, the widow of a prominent Amsterdam magistrate, a catalogue was drawn up of her library in preparation for selling the books at auction. To her library was added another recently deceased magistrate's widow, Cornelia Jacoba van Schuylenburch. This is one of only a handful of extant printed auction catalogues recording the contents of a library that had belonged, at least in part, to an eighteenth-century woman, 1 and is hence of particular interest for studying women's access to books. In this article, we address some of the questions suggested by this catalogue and others like it by tracing the reception and circulation of the works of a single author-illustrator, the prominent natural scientist Maria Sibylla Merian (1647-1717). We argue that auction catalogues are an underused source which can be used effectively to study the public personas of collectors, as well as the complexities of book ownership, authorial reputation, the literary market, and reading practices. Moving beyond methodology, and addressing issues more specifically of gender and reading culture, our case study ultimately seeks to nuance inherited generalizations concerning women's book collecting practices and the reception of female authors by bringing new source material to the table, and exploring new ways to use it.The printed catalogue of the 1789 auction of Dupeyrou's and Schuylenburch's books recorded the contents of the two libraries separately, with the title page advertising several of the more attractive volumes to be auctioned. These included legal works such as a six-volume folio Corpus Juris and the "Corps diplomatique by Dumont, Rousset, Barbeyrac, le Clerc &c. 33 parts bound in calf" 2 -which one may suppose had belonged to the magistrate husbands rather than their wives-as well as a complete set of the Encyclopédie, a quarto edition of Voltaire's Oeuvres in 24 volumes, and

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‘There Are Numbers of Very Choice Books’*: Book Ownership and the Circulation of Women’s Texts, 1680–98

Cited by 6 publications

References 0 publications

Berkeley's Gland Tour into Speculative Fiction Part 2: Margaret Cavendish and Berkeley's Attitudes Towards Women

Berkeley's Gland Tour into Speculative Fiction Part 2: Margaret Cavendish and Berkeley's Attitudes Towards Women

Women and the book in Britain's long eighteenth century

Marketing Maria Sibylla Merian, 1720–1800: Book Auctions, Gender, and Reading Culture in the Dutch Republic

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