Reception, reputation, and early modern women's missing texts

This article examines the role of the missing text in scholarship on early modern women's writing. The concept of the missing text remains of paramount importance to projects engaged in archival recovery; however, records of its former existence can be revealing of howa woman's writing was received and valued by her contemporaries. This article examines the (male) reception of now-lost texts in order to interrogate the construction of female writerly reputation in the early modern period. It maps the structures that facilitated both the circulation of women's texts and the documentation of their reception: transnationalCatholic networks (Dorothy Arundell, Elizabeth Willoughby,Mary Bonaventure Browne), English religious coteries (Elizabeth Walker, Mary Rich), Irish Gaelic poetic bands (Maire Ni Chrualaoich). It considers how such networks can be used to track missing texts and the challenges raised when they cannot be located at all, problematising the connection of authorial reputation to primary text.