Minding the Gap(s)

Abstract

• This cluster of essays explores women’s labor in printing houses; women as composers and collectors of oral culture and national song on the peripheries of the British Isles; and a project to introduce a diverse group of students to a little-known eighteenth-century archive by a little-known eighteenth-century woman. Although the essays address very different subjects, they share common concerns: what has been left out of book historical narratives thus far, and how the perspective of women’s book history can reframe those narratives. In doing so, the essays question both the media history of primary sources as it has been told and the archive as it has been collected and accessed. We, the authors, recognize that further absences and gaps will inevitably be discovered (both in the essays themselves and in this response), but we make the case for focusing on processes of research—such as collecting, making, and archival research—rather than just the finished products. Reflecting on these processes of doing research prompts us to ask questions as well about the processes of reading: Reader, who are you? Where are you sitting? What stories do you bring to this experience? All three essays draw attention to the importance of examining the relationship between material bodies and textual materials, both in terms of the initial creation of those texts by actual gendered human beings and in terms of the subsequent study of those texts by scholars who also possess flesh-and-blood bodies. In her essay, Cait Coker addresses the issue of gender in both the eighteenth-century printing house and current scholarly projects seeking to re-create those practices, asking, who are the female bodies in the print shop in the eighteenth century—and those in the locations involved in the production of this document right now? Leith Davis examines three women who foregrounded bodies that speak and sing while producing printed