Reading Women Literacy, Authorship, and Culture in the Atlantic World, 1500-1800 Edited by Heidi Brayman Hackel and Catherine E. Kelly "Destined to become a landmark study and a fixture in the bibliographies of feminist and textual scholars, literary and social historians, students of the English Renaissance and the American Republic alike."--William Sherman, University of York "Highly recommended."--Choice "Reading Women . . . generously offers important new historical, textual, and theoretical ways of accessing, describing, and interpreting early modern women's reading."--Journal of American History In 1500, as many as 99 out of 100 English women may have been illiterate, and girls of all social backgrounds were the objects of purposeful efforts to restrict their access to full literacy. Three centuries later, more than half of all English and Anglo-American women could read, and the female reader was emerging as a cultural ideal and a market force. While scholars have written extensively about women's reading in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and about women's writing in the early modern period, they have not attended sufficiently to the critical transformation that took place as female readers and their reading assumed significant cultural and economic power. Reading Women brings into conversation the latest scholarship by early modernists and early Americanists on the role of gender in the production and consumption of texts during this expansion of female readership. Drawing together historians and literary scholars, the essays share a concern with local specificity and material culture. Removing women from the historically inaccurate frame of exclusively solitary, silent reading, the authors collectively return their subjects to the activities that so often coincided with reading: shopping, sewing, talking, writing, performing, and collecting. With chapters on samplers, storytelling, testimony, and translation, the volume expands notions of reading and literacy, and it insists upon a rich and varied narrative that crosses disciplinary boundaries and national borders. Heidi Brayman Hackel is Associate Professor of English at University of California, Riverside and the author of Reading Material in Early Modern England: Print, Gender, and Literacy. Catherine E. Kelly is Associate Professor of History at the University of Oklahoma and author of In the New England Fashion: Reshaping Women's Lives in the Nineteenth Century. Material Texts 2007 280 pages 6 x 9 11 illus. ISBN 978-0-8122-4054-2 Cloth $59.95s £39.00 ISBN 978-0-8122-2080-3 Paper $22.50s £15.00 World Rights Literature, Women's/Gender Studies Short copy: Reading Women brings into conversation the latest scholarship by early modernists and early Americanists on the role of gender in the production and consumption of texts during the expansion of female readership in the early modern period.