From Social Capital to Product: The Commodification of Women’s Knowledge into English Printed Books 1615-1700

Abstract

While the early modern printed book is not an under-researched historical phenomenon, the recipe book, or books in the instructional literature genre, have often been left out of wide-ranging studies due to their complexity. This thesis aims to address this gap in research by tackling the themes of complex collaborative authorship, textual ownership, agency of actors, and the role of women in the process of production and reception of seventeenth-century English instructional literature. A small corpus of different texts has been selected to span the wide-reaching genre of instructional material, including housewifery, midwifery, and medical books for the domestic market. The lifespan of the printed book provides the structure, with the concept of pre-print authorship addressed in Chapter 1, the role of the Stationers and the Stationers Company in Chapter 2, and the reception and use of the book in Chapter 3. A key notion of this thesis is to go beyond the literary conceptions of these books and address their materiality as objects of use through marginalia analysis. A substantial portion of this research relied upon quantitative analysis of the catalogues of booksellers, as well as marginalia trends in surviving examples, coupled with close reading and qualitative study of texts. This thesis begins to situate scholarship of recipe and instructional literature as a genre on par with other areas of early modern book scholarship such as reference books and religious texts to draw more complete conclusions about knowledge pathways and early modern conceptions of communication and information.