Widows of Booksellers or Booksellers in their own right? Women and the Publishing Industry in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries

Abstract

Women participated actively in the 16th and 17th centuries publishing market. In that context, they acted, among other tasks, as book merchants, who were responsible not just for the book selling but also for finance the printing cost. Despite having developed these roles, in many cases their participation has been remained hidden behind the male name which appeared in the imprints or colophons. This has supposed that we have received a distort image of these women publishing activity. The aim of this paper is to offered a general approach to their work as book merchants through the information offered by the colophons, the historical documentation and the legal and publishing preliminaries. The intention is to propose some methodological lines which allow us to deal with a detailed research about the work of each of these women in order to reconstruct, in a comprehensive way, the scope of the role that they played in the publishing market of the Early Modern Age.