Collaboration and the early modern woman writer: materiality, authorship, performance

Collaboration has emerged as a dominant topic in early modern studies over the last thirty years, and the paradigm of collaboration has helped to fuel a feminist revisionist literary history that is alert to the variety of roles women and men played in early modern literary production. My thesis contributes to this project. I investigate the textual legacies of four sites of women’s manuscript production in early modern England: Jane Cavendish and Elizabeth Brackley’s Poems Songs a Pastorall and a Play; the Story Books produced by the Ferrar and Collet families at Little Gidding; Jane Lumley and Mary Howard’s translations, dedicated to their father, the Earl of Arundel; and Mary Wroth’s two manuscript versions of Love’s Victory. All of these texts are presentation volumes, or manuscript publications, and as such, they communicate as much through their material construction and visual ornamentation as they do through their written meanings. Questions of production, then, must reach beyond the author(s), narrowly defined, to include their processes of material construction. As plays, dialogues, orations and dedicatory epistles, furthermore, all four case studies bear a close relationship to performance, and therefore to oral and social histories. Cracking open the concept of authorship in this way admits a range of textual collaborators alongside writers. These collaborators contribute in technical and literary, emotional and economic, material and imaginative, obvious and hidden ways. How do these texts represent their own complex processes of collaborative production? What kinds of collaborations do they foreground and why? And what do these collaborations tell us about the operation of gender in the micro-history of the text? In order to answer these questions, I pilot a new kind of historicized reading practice that combines the macro-historical and materialist perspectives of book history with a close textual focus. I argue that early modern women’s manuscript production was multiply collaborative; that representations of collaboration are almost always discursive and strategic, even as they are also shaped by stylistic conventions; and that questions of proximity, status and labour inhere in representations of collaboration.