Introduction: Early Modern Women's Material Texts: Production, Transmission and Reception

The material conditions that influenced early modern women’s writing are crucial to understanding what women wrote and how their work can be read. Like all material artefacts, early modern women’s texts do not reach readers in isolation, but emerge through complex systems of production, transmission and reception. Criticism of early modern women’s writing in the last decade has increasingly emphasised their engagement with different generic forms and modes of circulation, expanding the parameters of the field beyond literary interpretation of the texts themselves to an engagement with their intricate textual histories. The current volume builds upon this work to produce a wide- ranging account of the rich and diverse material cultures through which early modern women’s writing was produced, transmitted and received. It focuses on the ways in which this writing was culturally mediated: how it was originally packaged and promoted, how it circulated in its contemporary contexts, and how it was read and received in later revisions and redactions. In doing so, Material Cultures of Early Modern Women’s Writing aims to illuminate not only the ways in which we read, analyse and value early modern women’s writing, but also to expand our understanding of the production, transmission and reception of early modern literature more broadly.