Paper

This entry highlights early modern women’s involvement at every stage of paper’s life cycle. It begins with the peasant women responsible for growing and harvesting flax, and moves to the impoverished, itinerant women who collected rags to be used as the raw material for papermaking. Offering an account of the manifold tasks assigned to women at the papermill, and concluding with the uses and reuses of paper by women in a range of contexts both literary and less so, this entry demonstrates that early modern women from a range of classes, education levels, and localities took part in every stage of the production and consumption of paper. The entry ends with a brief look at the gendered cultural discourse surrounding paper. Far from being peripheral to textual production, this entry demonstrates that women, paper, and women paper producers and consumers were central to early modern material culture.