From paratext to epitext: Mapping the authorial apparatus in early modern women's writing

Our focus on Early Modern Women's Writing and the Apparatus of Authorship in this special issue of Parergon responds to emerging trends in early modern women's studies that emphasize the importance of the material text to the literary, historical, and political analysis of women's works in the long early modern period. Attention to the material contexts of women's works is not new; it has, for instance, been a staple of the invaluable critical introductions to early modern women's texts that have been produced in the past thirty years.1 However, it is also the case that, until relatively recently, such scholarship has remained something of a specialist concern, standing in paratexual relationship to the text proper, as an introduction to the work that follows. This relationship has been reinforced in criticism that considers the literary interpretation of early modern women's writing before, or outside of, its material and textual specificity.2 If there has been something of a time lag in the material turn in early modern women's studies, this might be attributed, as Sarah C. E. Ross suggests in her introduction, to the field's initial focus [End Page 193] on the recovery of the historical woman writer and the assumption that gender provides the most pertinent interpretive crux to her text.3 While the past thirty years of scholarship has complicated this focus by incorporating analyses of rank, race, learning, sexuality, geographical location, and political and religious affiliation into the picture, the historical conditions that make a critical focus on gender valid and generative have by no means disappeared. The essays collected here share a continued focus on gender as a crucial feature of early modern women's writing, but they explore this focus in ways that attempt to unhinge it from immutable or essential associations with the body of the woman writer and insist instead on gender's shifting, contingent, productive, and performative relationships to the corpus of women's writing as we inherit it.