By offering a wide range of approaches to reading early modern women’s writing, including the use of archives old and new, this Special Issue advances the field of reading methodologies and the field of interpreting early modern women’s writing. While giving special attention to Margaret Cavendish, Katherine Philips, Aphra Behn, and Anne Finch, the approaches to reading included here can energize ongoing scholarship about these and other writers. The first three essays view reading through the lenses of book history, material textuality, and performance to enrich ongoing scholarship about reading in relation to seventeenth-century book owners, theatrical staging, and song culture. The fourth and fifth articles demonstrate how a nuanced application of both computational methods and analog methods of reading can strengthen conclusions about authorial attribution and enable new interpretive directions for scholars of early modern women’s writing. The final three articles explore the challenges of remaining historically sensitive to early modern women’s achievements while using twenty-first-century creative practices to make early modern women’s writing legible to audiences beyond the academy.

What kinds of early modern readers and collectors were interested in female-authored books? And did the fact of their female authorship matter to readers? This article explores these questions by investigating sale and auction catalogs, as well as domestic manuscript private library catalogs, that indicate ownership of works by Katherine Philips in the later seventeenth century. It emerges from research conducted by the RECIRC project investigating the reception of women’s writing in the early modern period. The kinds of book owners who acquired Philips’s works, the company her books kept in their collections, and ways in which we might interpret her place on their bookshelves, are the focus. The discussion assesses her status in relation to female contemporaries (British, French, Italian, Spanish), using Philips as the anchor-point for a wider consideration of the presence of female authors in book collections of the period. (143)

“Ay, this reading of Books is a pernicious thing,” remarks Scaramouch to his master’s daughter, Elaria, in Aphra Behn’s The Emperor of the Moon (1687). In the play’s closing moments, Doctor Baliardo, Scaramouch’s master, insists that someone should “Burn all my Books, and let my Study Blaze, / Burn all to Ashes, and be sure the Wind / Scatter the vile Contagious Monstrous Lyes.” This article explores Aphra Behn’s explicit and implicit reflections on reading in this comedy, and reflects on how Scaramouch’s careful observation sheds light on the practices of reading, both in Behn’s time and in our own. Particular attention is paid to the comedy’s use of commedia dell’arte, to how that use of physical comedy is communicated to readers of the playbook, and to the opportunities of today’s editors to make available to modern readers a fuller understanding of how a Restoration text works. In the case of The Emperor of the Moon, those contexts include acknowledgement of how Black people were made use of in the annual Lord’s Mayor’s Show. Throughout this article, the work of editors for The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Aphra Behn is drawn on, and brief discussion of other Behn works, including Abdelazer, A Discovery of New Worlds, The Dutch Lover, The Fair Jilt, The False Count, The Feign’d Curtizans, The Luckey Chance, La Montre and The Second Part of the Rover is included.

Despite the advances that recent scholars have made in analyzing Finch’s singular achievements in the literary and political contexts of her time, few attend to a significant portion of Finch’s poems—her songs—especially as they arose from the context of the late Restoration song culture. Using as a point of departure the evidence of Finch’s engagement with music in the earliest printings of her work in the 1680s and 1690s, I argue that Finch’s interest in song ran deep. Scholarly neglect of this point has contracted modern understanding of how her songs were read by her contemporaries, how twenty-first century readers might strive to read them, how song more generally informed her oeuvre, and how her participation in song culture tells us more than other surviving evidence about her life and art in relation to the entertainment milieu. To explore these varied ways of reading Finch’s songs and song itself as central to her poetic values, I analyze the contexts for reading her songs in print (as they included settings by Henry Purcell and Raphael Courteville) in the late Restoration and conclude by briefly considering the contexts for reading her songs and references to song in her earliest surviving manuscript book, compiled c. 1690–1696, initially titled “Poems on Several Subjects Written by Areta.”

This paper discusses the traditional reading of two Restoration dramatic comedies, The Debauchee (first performed 1676-7) and The Revenge (first performed 1679-80), as the works of English playwright Aphra Behn (c.1640-1689), despite their anonymous performance and publication, and their status as adaptations from earlier seventeenth-century plays. My approach combines two complementary perspectives. Firstly, I consider the evidence and circulating historical discourses relating to these works, from the plays’ debut to their current position within the peripheral canon of Behn’s work, and reflect on the cultural and political implications of a willingness to read authorship, and specifically female authorship, into the “anonymous” space each comedy provides. Secondly, I use digital stylistic methods to examine the linguistic properties of these texts. Computational stylistics uses digital tools to identify patterns and trends in language to identify correlates with genre, time period, authorial style and other literary, social and historical concepts. When comparing the stylistic properties of each play with more securely attributed works by Behn, the findings suggest a strong likeness for one play (The Revenge), but not the other (The Debauchee). I consider what this suggests for the readiness of past and present readers to see and to accept Behn’s authorship of these works as a female Restoration writer. I highlight the implications of these new findings for our reading of Restoration dramatic authorship, appropriation and collaboration more widely, and the opportunities for digital stylistics as a reading perspective in future work.

This article explores how digital systems and analyses serve as intermediaries in the process of human reading. Scholarly readers are attuned to words and narratives but also to patterns, verbal systems, textual structures and physical manifestations. In digital systems, the representation of these features for reading depends on the deep-level digital representation—the information model—that underpins the entire reading system. I argue that such models constitute readings, and that some digital models constitute scholarly readings. I will offer an account of how a particular type of scholarly modeling (exemplified by the Text Encoding Initiative Guidelines) works as a reading and in support of reading, in ways that have especially close connections to scholarship on the early modern period, using examples from several prominent digital projects.

The article analyses the role of creative writing as a mode of practice‑based research capable of generating new historical knowledge about early modern women’s lives, midwifery, and domestic experience. Drawing on extensive archival scholarship and the author’s two novels, The Gossips Choice and The Midwife’s Truth set in the 1660s, it demonstrates how fictionalization enables the recovery of sensory, material, and affective dimensions absent from conventional historiography. The discussion interrogates the tension between historical accuracy and culturally shaped expectations of authenticity, and examines the representational challenges posed by childbirth, marriage, and gendered authority. This reflective article argues that historical fiction constitutes a legitimate and productive methodology for scholarly inquiry.

Our paper examines contradictory readings of early women’s lives and works that emerge from tensions between the entertainment demands of the market and the feminist aspirations of modern authors who aim to bring recognition to historical women. Such tensions create a troubling pattern of modern representations and readings that are seemingly celebratory of early modern women, yet nonetheless dismissive of their historical accomplishments. We consider both triumphs and missteps that mark those practices in recent stage and film representations of female historical figures from the past decade. These include the wives of Henry VIII, the poet Amelia Lanyer, and the literary author and philosopher Margaret Cavendish. In offering our readings of these modern productions, we aim to illuminate ways that the marketplace misreads historical women, while calling attention to exceptional readings of early women that achieve a balance between entertainment, historical accuracy, and women’s agency. 

This essay examines the commissioning of a statue to Aphra Behn in Canterbury as a case study in contemporary practices of public commemoration within a contested monumental landscape. Situating the project within a commemorative culture reshaped by the public removal of monuments deemed ethically untenable, it argues that monuments must now be understood as hermeneutically unstable texts rather than fixed commemorative statements. Drawing on archival research in seventeenth-century parish, judicial, and state records, as well as feminist monument campaigns and material culture studies, the essay explores how acts of reading, textual recovery, and public pedagogy shaped both the justification for and the form of the monument. Particular attention is paid to the fragmentary nature of Behn’s archival record and the ways in which biographical understanding is produced through absence, mediation, and conjecture. It traces the ethical, political, and economic pressures bearing upon contemporary commemorative practice, including debates over gendered erasure, commodification, and institutional risk. Ultimately, the essay proposes sculpture as a medium uniquely suited to figures like Behn, whose lives survive unevenly in the archive, and advances commemoration itself as an open-ended, readerly practice responsive to historical incompleteness and civic reinterpretation.