ABSTRACT

This chapter discusses the archiving and survival of women's writings, but also the nature of early modern English women's relationship to the archive and by implication their relationship with knowledge and power. To Joan Wallach Scott, the feminist archive, those collections assembled in the nineteenth and twentieth century in Britain, France and the US, which created libraries or archives documenting the accomplishments of women, connects archives in a very real sense with modern day politics. The relationships between archives and power as it intersects with issues of gender are extremely complex, and are in many ways at the heart of how we reconstruct and recover women's involvement in early modern political culture. Archives, as Alan Stewart has recently shown in his study of the setting up of the State Paper Office in England during the reign of James VI and I, were essentially constructed, records selectively preserved for particular purposes, which necessarily generates gaps, omissions and silences in the record.