Marking It as Her Own: Early Modern Women and the Bible

This essay traces the inky marks left by sixteenth- and seventeen-century women readers in a corpus of 215 vernacular English Bibles and psalm books in the Bodleian Library, Oxford. It asks what information about early modern women as Bible readers can been gleaned from this material evidence and what kind of cultural capital those books accrued by being owned by women. It argues for the importance of female ownership to early modern readers and suggests that the recent interest in female book ownership is, in one sense, a return to early modern mores in which maternal ownership of Bibles made them peculiarly prized.