Women Editing/Editing Women : Early Modern Women Writers and the New Textualism

This collection of essays links current research in the writings and editing of early modern women and in those women who were themselves early editors with a new methodology of editing currently titled “the new textualism.” As such, the collection seeks to solve two problems. The first concerns the difficulty of editing the works of early modern women writers for whom there is little biographical data, a challenging task when the standard “life and works” format is thus inhibited. Second, related but slightly different, occurs because, although we know that there were women who edited in the early modern and even later periods, we know little about them as well. The new textualism approach to editing, which focuses on the material properties of the manuscript or book, its print or performance history and records of its dissemination, and the sociology of texts, provides a fruitful solution to both problems by broadening the concept of agency and hence provides a richer context for the production of a given text.The collection includes two sets of essays. One set has been reprinted from seminal works in the field of new textualism. These include writings by recognized figures like Jerome McGann, Leah Marcus, and Wendy Wall, among others. As such, that set provides background for the reading of the second, a group of six original essays by scholars now working in the field of early modern women writers who directly apply aspects of the new textualism in their research. The fusion of the research field of retrieving early modern women writers with the practices of new textualist editing is thus the core of this collection of essays and is illustrative of what can be achieved in the field of editing when this new approach to texts is put into practice.