Transmission

Transmission involves all stages of the text’s entry and existence in the world, from the author’s initial instantiation through to contemporaries’ independent reuses and posthumous reworkings, with positive and negative implications for authorial reputations, and beyond to the editorial interventions of later centuries. Hence, transmission operates on a historical continuum of literary history, from contemporary to modern-day readers. Those who transmit an early modern woman’s writing are often themselves engaged in acts of creative production as they reposition and recycle her work. This entry examines the ways in which female-authored texts were circulated; the forms, mediums, and agents of transmission; and the processes by which texts were sundered from the yoke of their initial creation to become all kinds of different entities, subordinate to their new contexts and circumstances.