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Marie-Louise Coolahan




The Reception of Women’s ‘Lost’ Texts

Abstract

This paper will approach the question of the transnational reception of early modern women’s texts by exploring what happens to texts that are received, but whose original is apparently lost. It will take three examples: the biography of Father John Cornelius authored by the English Catholic, Dorothy Arundell; the chronicle of the Irish Poor Clare nuns, composed by Mary Bonaventure Browne; and the siege-letters written by Lettice Fitzgerald during the Irish wars of 1642. In all three cases, the original texts do not survive; but we have ample evidence of their contemporary reception and recycling. This paper will explore how and why the now-lost originals were transmitted, received, recycled and re-used. It will show that religious communities are particularly rich in transnational reception networks, female and male, in the early modern period. In the case of Fitzgerald, it is the resonant fear of religious war that determines the topicality and transmission of her gendered letters.

These case studies will be applied to the WomenWriters database in order to probe, firstly, how such ‘lost’ texts can be recorded and evaluated in qualitative terms and, secondly, the issue of manuscript and print datafields.







SvD, October 2011



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