A History of the Credit Market in Central Europe

of editions. Attending to visual cues, Erika Boeckeler discusses widows who used printers’ devices to affirm their role in book production, while Martine van Elk compares the business strategies and self-presentation of stationers in the Dutch Republic and in England. In one of her footnotes, Boeckeler notes that scholars need more reference tools pertaining to female stationers; this is true, and both Farmer and Van Elk provide valuable lists as appendixes. The second section turns to women who labored in making texts as authors and editors. This is familiar terrain for scholars trained in literature departments, but the concept of the author/editor as a maker is enriched as we are prompted to consider literary labor in light of the other kinds of labor involved in book production. Kirk Melnikoff highlights the relations between literary creation and the bookshop as he studies the resonances between Isabella Whitney’s poems and other works sold by her printer and publisher. Sarah Wall-Randell addresses the sexist biases in authorship studies and asks whether it is reasonable to consider the Countess of Pembroke as the coauthor of the 1593 Arcadia, and Molly Yarn draws us into the nineteenth century through a discussion of Katherine Lee Bates, a poet and editor of student editions of Shakespeare’s plays. The third section focuses on women whose labor involved reading, collecting, and marking books. Elizabeth Kolkovich argues that reading, writing, and patronage were all ways that elite women could make books, while Georgianna Ziegler and Lori Newcomb offer ways of detecting meaningful patterns within large sets of annotations and point out that women’s reading was personal and social. The collection is remarkably cohesive, and the reader benefits from the fact that core ideas (from Rebecca Olson, Maureen Bell, and Helen Smith) are discussed in several essays. The essays are of very high quality and the book is well illustrated. It will be useful to a wide range of scholars interested in the history of the book.