‘Matters of Household Proffit’: Sixteenth‐Century Manuscript and Print Exchanges in Bodleian Library, Ashmole 1477 ^☆

Abstract The household book is a particular feature of the landscape of manuscript production post‐1475, and is particularly associated with women. Compiling manuscript household books in a post‐print landscape involved a specific kind of dialogue between the two material forms. It is useful to reframe the practice of retranslating printed material (often based on works in manuscript or older works) into manuscript form as a kind of cultural exchange and, moreover, as an extension of the regular work practices of the female domestic sphere, many of which involve different types of transaction. This article considers the production of domestic household manuscript books in the context of exchange. I focus on several manuscripts copied by women, including Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Ashmole 1477, part of which can be linked to Dorothy Lewkenore, who began to compile her manuscript in the late sixteenth century. I also consider their attention to materiality, performativity, ownership and subjectivity as especially gendered, imagining a nexus of exchange involving the compiler and the object, and indeed other readers. These material artefacts can be usefully conceptualized as semi‐public spaces, not solely intended for consultation by one individual, and therefore having a transactional function that extends beyond the primary context.