"His most bountiful mistress" : female dedicatees in early modern British print, 1473-1699

This thesis is the first general study of dedications to women in British print in the early modern period. Dedications were an important part of the print process and should be treated as an essential piece of a book’s story when they are included. Dedications also function as extant evidence of a person’s already established influence as an important community member. This thesis’s focus on non-royal women means to use dedications to understand the social power women held during this period. Severing dedications from pure economic patronage where money was sent to the dedicator in payment for their epistle allows for the exploration of women’s use of soft power and reveals their lines of influence in early modern Britain. Through the marriage of data collected from Franklin B. Williams’s Index of Dedications and Commendatory Verses Until 1641 with my own original data from 1641 until 1699, I have been able to look at the broad trends of dedications over the entire period regarding men, women, and married couples. With this data, I have been able to trace not just how many books were dedicated to women, but what proportion of all dedicated books went to them, what genres they were in, and who was responsible for their creation. Beyond just data analysis, my thesis seeks to demonstrate dedicatory epistles as a key piece of historical evidence when researching early modern British women. Too often, dedications have been written off as generic and repetitive: the truth is that they hold thousands of stories simmering beneath the surface. For women’s history, these dedications allow us to see the lines of soft power and community influence they wielded in their lifetimes, giving us an unprecedented look into their abilities to change their worlds.