Determining authorship and editing early modern women’s manuscripts

Book section : Chapter

Editing a woman writer has to start with establishing whether the writer is a woman, especially if the work is anonymous, using criteria such as the content of the writing, and the context of its preservation, given that there is a great deal of writing by men which adopts a feminine voice. Some kinds of writing do not signal the author’s gender at all, and female authorship is only indicated by external evidence. Women’s writing is often preserved as part of a coterie collection, and in this context, some women writers were keen to identify themselves, while others were apparently indifferent, or chose to conceal themselves. Particular problems are raised by texts which have been redacted by male editors, however sympathetic, since unconscious bias may affect how they understand, and therefore represent, the woman writer in question. Other problems with texts physically written by a woman are raised if they display idiosyncratic orthography or poor penmanship, since this creates major problems of how extensively a modern editor should intervene.

Authors: Stevenson, J

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Host title: The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Early Modern Women's Writing
• Place of publication: Cham, Switzerland
• Publication date: 2025-07-02
• Acceptance date: 2020-11-20
• Edition: 0
• DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-01537-4_79-3
• EISBN: 9783030015374
• Language: English
• Keywords: anonymity; attribution; coterie writing; literacy; orthography; scribal publication; script
• Subtype: Chapter