ABSTRACT
How did the introduction of the print medium in 1470 affect women in publication culture over the following one hundred years or so? In some ways, very little. The print medium inherited many of the gendered traditions of manuscript production and dissemination. There were often few differences between women’s experiences as authors in the scribal and print publication mediums. Women often justified their act of publication in manuscripts just as they did in printed texts, since contemporaries could conceive of writing in both mediums as a public action. Female-authored writings could broach similar topics and appear in similar locations in both scribal and printed publication. Future studies of women writing must discard the convenient but unrepresentative blanket distinction between a dangerous public world of print and the ‘safe’ privacy of manuscript circulation for female authors, especially given the variety of modes of manuscript writing available to female authors. 1
