Gender, Authorship, and Early Modern Women’s Collaboration

Patricia Pender

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9783319587769
• eBook ISBN:
  9783319587776
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: Literature

This book explores the collaborative practices – both literary and material – that women undertook in the production of early modern texts. It confronts two ongoing methodological dilemmas.  How does conceiving women's texts as collaborations between authors, readers, annotators, editors, printers, and patrons uphold or disrupt current understandings of authorship? And how does reconceiving such texts as collaborative illuminate some of the unresolved discontinuities and competing agendas in early modern women's studies?  From one perspective, viewing early modern women's writing as collaborative seems to threaten the hard-won legitimacy of the authors we have already recovered; from another, developing our understanding of literary agency beyond capital "A" authorship opens the field to the surprising range of roles that women played in the history of early modern books. Instead of trying to simply shift, disaggregate or adjudicate between competing claims for male or female priority in the production of early modern texts, Gender, Authorship, and Early Modern Women's Collaboration investigates the role that gender has played – and might continue to play – in understanding early modern collaboration and its consequences for women's literary history. 

Table of contents

• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Chapter 1 Introduction: Gender, Authorship, and Early Modern Women’s Collaboration
• Part I Literary and Intertextual Co-labor
• Chapter 2 Katherine Parr, Henry VIII, and Royal Literary Collaboration
• Chapter 3 Collaboration in the Parliamentary Speeches of Queen Elizabeth I
• Chapter 4 Conflicted Collaboration in The Mothers Legacy
• Chapter 5 Collaboration, Authorship, and Gender in the Paratexts Accompanying Translations by Susan Du Verger and Judith Man
• Part II Collective Contexts and Material Co-production
• Chapter 6 Literary Gifts: Performance and Collaboration in the ArundelLumley Family Manuscripts
• Chapter 7 The Clerics and the Learned Lady: Intertextuality in the Religious Writings of Lady Jane Grey
• Chapter 8 Paratextual Marginalia, Early Modern Women, and Collaboration
• Chapter 9 “All Fell Not in Pharsalias Field”: Lucy Harington Russell and the Historical Epic
• Chapter 10 “A Veray Patronesse”: Margaret Beaufort and the Early English Printers
• Chapter 11 Afterword: “Her Book” and Early Modern Modes of Collaboration
• Bibliography
• Index