My Lady's Books: Devising a Tool Kit for Quantitative Research; or, What Is a Book and How Do We Count It?

abstract:This essay outlines the methodological challenges posed by quantitative analysis of women's book ownership in the early modern period, asking, how do we systematize the defiantly unsystematic? The sources from which we glean evidence of women's relationships with books are eclectic and idiosyncratic. This essay analyzes the function and context of such sources—booklists and catalogs, household inventories, wills and probate inventories, donation registers, ownership inscriptions, and bookplates—in order to identify the ways in which they may skew what we count. Arguing that a combination of methodological transparency with awareness of these potential pitfalls arms us to engage with comparative numbers, the essay concludes by assessing current ideas about the relative size and content of women's book collections. Ultimately, while such incomplete evidence attests to significant levels of book acquisition by women, the gaps that remain show that our current figures underestimate the full extent of their book ownership.