A Colonial Woman’s Bookshelf

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Description

A Colonial Woman’s Bookshelf represents a significant contribution to the study of the intellectual life of women in British North The usa. Kevin J. Hayes studies the books these women read and the reasons why they read them. As Hayes notes, latest studies at the literary tastes of early American women have concentrated at the post-revolutionary period, when several women novelists emerged. Yet, he observes, women were reading long before they started writing and publishing novels, and, actually, mounting evidence now suggests that literacy rates among colonial women were much higher than prior to now supposed. To reconstruct what might have filled a typical colonial woman’s bookshelf, Hayes has mined such sources as wills and estate inventories, surviving volumes inscribed by women, private and non-private library catalogs, sales ledgers, borrowing records from subscription libraries, and latest biographical sketches of notable colonial women. Hayes identifies several categories of reading material. These range from devotional works and conduct books to midwifery guides and cookery books, from novels and shuttle books to science books. In his concluding chapter, he describes the tensions that were developing near the end of the colonial period between the emerging cult of domesticity and the appetite for learning many women displayed. With its meticulous research and wealthy detail, A Colonial Woman’s Bookshelf makes a valuable contribution to our understanding of the complexities of life in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century The usa.

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