Abstract
This chapter addresses the collision of female attribution with questions of digital representation. Early modern compilers of manuscript miscellanies ascribed poems and complaints to a wide spectrum of female-gendered authors, from historically verified to pseudonymous and generic women. Using their experience in building a database for the project RECIRC: The Reception and Circulation of Early Modern Women’s Writing, 1550–1700, the authors describe how they defined, and sought to capture data about, “female-authored” texts. They argue for the careful disentanglement of attribution from ascription, and of both from authorship and poetic voice, and propose new data fields for the differentiation of female-attributed texts. The discussion is illuminated by case studies encompassing contested, anonymous, and pseudonymous authorship, in order to frame non-binary formulations of gender in digital terms.
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Notes
- 1.
For further information, see https://recirc.nuigalway.ie. Research for this chapter was funded by the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP/2007-2013/ERC Grant Agreement no. 615545) and was carried out by the authors and Sajed Chowdhury.
- 2.
On the three steps in data modelling, see Fotis Jannidis and Julia Flanders, “A gentle introduction to data modelling,” in The Shape of Data in the Digital Humanities, ed. Julia Flanders and Fotis Jannidis (London and New York: Routledge, 2019), 82–83. Technical details about the RECIRC database are available at https://recirc.nuigalway.ie/about-data/technical-overview.
- 3.
For insightful critiques of this model, see Elizabeth Grosz, Sexual Signatures (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), esp. 10–12; Danielle Clarke, ‘“Introduction,” in ‘This Double Voice’: Gendered Writing in Early Modern England, ed. Danielle Clarke and Elizabeth Clarke (New York: St. Martin’s Press and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), 1–2; Rosalind Smith, Sonnets and the English Woman Writer (Houndmills and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), esp. 12, 16, 61, and 120–21; and Michelle O’Callaghan, “The “Great Queen of Lightninge Flashes”: The Transmission of Female-Voiced Burlesque Poetry in the Early Seventeenth Century,”, in Material Cultures of Women’s Writing, ed. Patricia Pender and Rosalind Smith (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 100, 105–6, 115.
- 4.
Smith, Sonnets, 25.
- 5.
Miriam Posner, “What’s Next: The Radical, Unrealized Potential of Digital Humanities,” in Debates in the Digital Humanities 2016, ed. Matthew K. Gold and Lauren F. Klein (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), 34, 35; open-access text available at http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/text/54.
- 6.
Posner, “What’s Next,” 33–34.
- 7.
Amber Billey and Emily Drabinski, ‘Questioning Authority’, TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 6 (2019): 117–23.
- 8.
Michelle Schwartz and Constance Crompton, “Remaking History: Lesbian Feminist Historical Methods in the Digital Humanities,” in Bodies of Information: Intersectional Feminism and Digital Humanities, ed. Elizabeth Losh and Jacqueline Wernimont (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018), 146–47.
- 9.
See also Susan Brown, “Categorically Provisional,” PMLA, 50 (2020): 165–74, published as this book went to press.
- 10.
Peter Beal, A Dictionary of English Manuscript Terminology, 1450–2000 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 24, 28–29; and Erin A. McCarthy, “Axes of Uncertainty and Recovering Women’s Voices in Early Modern Miscellanies,” http://ssemwg.org/blog/mccarthy/, 12 April 2019.
- 11.
See Micheline White,”Introduction,” in Ashgate Critical Essays on Women Writers in England 1550–1700, vol. 3, Anne Lock, Isabella Whitney and Aemilia Lanyer, ed. Micheline White (Farnham and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009), xii.
- 12.
The lists of works by non-Anglophone authors were limited to print titles, with individual works added as receptions of those works were located—a resource-driven compromise based on our project’s timeframe and parameters.
- 13.
See Jannidis and Flanders, The Shape of Data, 55–82.
- 14.
The subscription to “D.C.” is dated 1568 and appears in British Library Royal MS 12 B.18. See Elizabeth I: Collected Works, ed. Leah S. Marcus, Janel Mueller, and Mary Beth Rose (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2000), 47, n. 1; Steven W. May, “‘Tongue-Tied Our Queen?’: Queen Elizabeth’s Voice in the Seventeenth Century,” in Resurrecting Elizabeth I in Seventeenth-Century England, ed. Elizabeth Hageman and Katherine Conway (Vancouver: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2007), 55.
- 15.
See Steven W. May, Queen Elizabeth I: Selected Works (New York: Washington Square Press, 2004), 330; and Coolahan, McCarthy, and Chowdhury, forthcoming.
- 16.
See also May, “Tongue-tied,” 63.
- 17.
See O’Callaghan, “Great Queen of Lightninge Flashes,” 104.
- 18.
British Library Egerton MS 923, fol. 56r.
- 19.
On patronage, instigation, and authorship, see Jane Stevenson, “Women, Writing and Scribal Publication in the Sixteenth Century,” English Manuscript Studies 1100–1700 9 (2000): 14–15.
- 20.
Bodleian Library MS Eng. poet. c. 50, fol. 33v.
- 21.
William Camden, Remaines concerning Britaine, STC 4525 (London, 1636), sig. Ggg3r–v (pp. 413–14) (EEBO).
- 22.
Wits Recreations, STC 25870 (London, 1640), sig. L1 (EEBO).
- 23.
Union First-Line Index of English Verse, http://firstlines.folger.edu (accessed 15 January 2019). We found an additional copy in British Library Add. MS 29492, fol. 5r. See also John Rous’s compilation of the poem in his diary as “A ladie with one eye had a pretty sonne that by a jerke of the coachman’s whippe lost an eye”; “1633, April, I received these verses”; Diary of John Rous, Incumbent of Santon Downham, Suffolk, from 1625 to 1642, ed. Mary Anne Everett Green (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 72, 70.
- 24.
Wits Recreations, sig. L1; Wits Interpreter, the English Parnassus, Wing C6370 (London, 1655), sig. 2A8v (EEBO); Roger Vilvain, Enchiridium epigrammatum Latin-Anglicum, Wing V395 (London, 1654) sig. Y4v (EEBO). Vilvain reproduces the epigram with the heading “Frater & Soror Monoculi”; curiously, though the poem above is identified as one drawn from “Camdens Remains”, this one is said to be “Anonymus” [sic].
- 25.
Charles Cotton, Poems on Several Occasions, Wing C6390 (London, 1689), 548 (EEBO); T. M., A Miscellaneous Collection of Poems, Songs, and Epigrams, 2 vols. ESTC T106190 (Dublin, 1721), I.68; A Collection of Epigrams, ESTC T41 (London, 1727), sig. L3r; A Collection of Select Epigrams, ESTC T124651 (London, 1757), 91; The London Magazine, or Monthly Chronologer, March and April 1745, 149, 201 [102]; all respectively ECCO.
- 26.
See also Marcy L. North, The Anonymous Renaissance: Cultures of Discretion in Tudor-Stuart England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), ch. 7.
- 27.
Bodleian Library MS Rawl. poet. 26, fol. 20r.
- 28.
Andrew McRae and Alastair Bellany, eds., Early Stuart Libels http://www.earlystuartlibels.net/htdocs/spanish_match_section/Nvi1.html and http://www.earlystuartlibels.net/htdocs/pdf/n/Nvi1.pdf (accessed 25 January 2019).
- 29.
See McRae and Bellany, whose introduction accompanies a full text of the libel and a list of witnesses.
- 30.
Margaret Crum, First-Line Index of English Poetry, 1500–1800, in Manuscripts of the Bodleian Library, Oxford, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), O803; see also C683.
- 31.
Bodleian Library MS Rawl. poet. 26, fol. 20r.
- 32.
McRae and Bellany, Early Stuart Libels, ll. 171–72.
- 33.
Arthur F. Marotti, Manuscript, Print, and the English Renaissance Lyric (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), 55.
- 34.
Bodleian Library MSS Eng. poet. c. 50, fol. 25v; Rawl. poet. 26, fol. 20r; Rawl. poet. 152, fol. 4r.
- 35.
Sarah C. E. Ross, Women, Poetry, and Politics in Seventeenth-Century Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 108. See also The Works of Sir John Suckling: The Non-Dramatic Works, ed. Thomas Clayton (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 89, 292–93, and Germaine Greer, Susan Hastings, Jeslyn Medoff, and Melinda Sansone, eds., Kissing the Rod: An Anthology of Seventeenth-Century Women’s Verse (London: Virago, 1988), 116–17.
- 36.
Scott A. Trudell, Unwritten Poetry: Song, Performance, and Media in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 178.
- 37.
Bodleian Library MS Rawl. poet. 16, 16; Beinecke Library, Osborn MS b. 233, 18 [fol. 9v].
- 38.
See Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’ (New York: Routledge, 1993) and Elizabeth D. Harvey, Ventriloquized Voices: Feminist Theory and English Renaissance Texts (London: Routledge, 1992).
- 39.
See also Jane Stevenson and Peter Davidson, eds., Early Modern Women Poets: An Anthology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 292 for Cavendish’s poem and xxxiii–xxxvi for their discussion of context, provenance, and genre as determining factors in the attribution of anonymous verse to women. See Ross, Women, Poetry, and Politics, 100–34, for the most sustained treatment of Cavendish as an author.
- 40.
In an important recent essay about quantitative studies of slavery, Jessica Marie Johnson shows that “Data without an accompanying humanistic analysis … served to further obscure the social and political realities of black diasporic life under slavery”; see “Markup Bodies: Black [Life] Studies and Slavery [Death] Studies at the Digital Crossroads,” Social Text 36 (2018): 61.
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Coolahan, ML., McCarthy, E.A. (2020). From Manuscripts to Metadata: Understanding and Structuring Female-Attributed Complaints. In: Ross, S., Smith, R. (eds) Early Modern Women's Complaint. Early Modern Literature in History. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-42946-1_13
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