From the Women in Book History Bibliography site:
Our Mission
This platform promotes ongoing work in women's book history by providing a hub where scholarship and resources on women's writing and labor is made visible. We believe that collecting data, making this work “count,” is a feminist act that preserves our past and shapes our future. Women’s book history is continually evolving and restructuring, and we are committed to actively reflecting this dynamic field through our interrelated projects.
The Bibliography
The bibliography is a database of secondary sources on women's writing and labor. Primarily our sources are in English, and non-English sources have a rough translation included. The database is not meant to be an exhaustive list of all book history sources that refer to women or discuss women, but instead a thorough snapshot of studies that take women as their primary subjects.
There are several factors that we would like to be transparent about. First, our database has an Anglo-American bias. We are slowly complicating this with more global sources (and are happy to take any suggestions for more). Secondly, we are literary scholars who focus on the broad Early Modern period, and the database is shaped by these interests and our training in these fields. Third, we define “women” as a constructionist, not an essentialist, identity. We actively index scholarship on multiple definitions of “women” and include non-binary subjects.
Our project is meant to be descriptive of the field, not proscriptive. We define book history in the same terms as Leslie Howsam in Old Books and New Histories: the intersection of history, literary studies, and bibliography. As such, our list clusters around the overlaps between these subfields that we list in the "Fields" option on the database. Since book historians have significant interest with digital methodologies, we specifically index sources working on gender in digital humanities. As a project of intersectional feminism, we also index sources by other relevant interests: critical race studies, postcolonialism, and LGBT+ and sexuality.
This list is a growing organism, and we are always open to adding new sources. Please contact us with suggestions for new additions.
