‘There are numbers of very choice books’*: Book ownership and the circulation of women’s texts, 1680–98

Introducing an auction catalogue that lists more than 1000 works from the combined libraries of the Dutch bibliophiles Gaspar Fagel and Stephen Le Moyne, the London bookseller John Bullord pushes quantity and exclusivity: ʼnumbers of very choice books’. This essay narrows the selection of choice books further than the trader intended by focusing on the female- authored texts that were advertised for sale in such catalogues in the late seventeenth century; what number of books written by women were held in early modern libraries? It emerges from our work on the RECIRC project (Reception and Circulation of Early Modern Women’s Writing, 1550-1700), which runs until 2019. 1 RECIRC is researching the impact made by women writers in the early modern period from the perspectives of reception and circulation, building on scholarly work of recent decades that has centred on recovery and analysis of women’s literary production. It participates in a shift away from recovery research toward interrogating women’s place in literary history via the assessment of textual transmission and audience. Our use of the concept of impact cannot be untouched (and is therefore informed) by the contemporary drive to measure academic scholarship in sometimes controversial ways. Elsewhere in this volume, Katherine Binhammer critiques ‘the neo-liberal university’s appetite for quantifi cation and empirical research’ (p. 67). We cannot claim to be independent of the moment in which we research and write, and our project responds, in a historicist way, to the debates generated by that appetite. We argue that the quantitative moves advocated in this essay can generate new grand narratives as well as raising research questions that return us anew to the qualitative and particular.