Exhibition: 'Her booke' Early Modern Women and their Books

This exhibition will highlight material owned, written, commissioned, and translated by women during the long early modern period.

It celebrates the ways in which women and their books were an integral part of England's devotional, intellectual, and bibliographical cultures. Beginning in the late fifteenth century, the exhibition will examine the production and use of books for personal and spiritual practices; books as a statement of power and piety; the development of the commercial trade in books; books as a site to demonstrate women's intellectual ability; and the material evidence of women's book ownership.

Items on display will include: medieval manuscripts written by the sisters of Syon Abbey on the cusp of the Reformation; Elizabeth I's newly identified translation of Tacitus; correspondence from a future Archbishop of Canterbury about Jane Austen; and first editions of the works of Mary Wollstonecraft and her daughter Mary Shelley. They will be displayed alongside other works related to known and unknown women from our collections.