Group blog
Welcome to this blog on early modern female book ownership. It features very short blog posts on books owned by women between 1500 and 1750. These books are important as they give us information on what books women owned and read, on women’s handwriting and signatures, and on how women presented themselves textually. The blog serves as a record of such books, especially since some of them are sold to private owners and may not be accessible to academics otherwise. The field of book ownership by women and women and book history more generally is a flourishing one, and this website aims to contribute to it in a small way.
Categories used most frequently by the blogger:
female book ownership 17th century religion 18th century secular non-fiction bibles drama 16th century women writers poetry history fiction Book binding Dutch French politics 19th century literature Puritan Allison Library Regent College
22 November 2023
Today we feature a 1682 Bible printed in Oxford and jointly owned by husband and wife Thomas and Mary Buswell in the 18th century. The reversed calf binding is intricately blind-tooled,...
William Lily, Short Introduction of Grammar (1696)
7 November 2023
Cheaply printed and often read to pieces by their young users, early modern schoolbooks are scarce survivals. Early modern schoolbooks with evidence of female provenance are even more...
Bacon and Rawley, Sylva Sylvarum, or, A Naturall Historie (1631)
24 October 2023
One of the most popular works of the seventeenth century is Francis Bacon’s Sylva Sylvarum, or, a Natural Historie, first published the year after he died in 1627 and compiled by...
10 October 2023
by Victoria E. Burke This post adds another physical book owned by Katherine Blount to her ever-expanding library list and also reveals a manuscript that demonstrates her reading...