ABSTRACT
This chapter begins with general observations about the discursive horizons of men's and women's manuscript notebooks, and follows with particular cases that spell out the uses and limits of the concept. It joins the trend in the study of early modern women's literature to shift the focus from the text's voice as personal expression to its rhetoric as cultural engagement. The chapter offers the initial generalizations less as firm rules than as a hermeneutic open to qualification. In the case of early modern English women writers, in particular, the field still discovers new, landscape-changing material every year. A collation or a meditation by itself may offer no marks of the writer's gender but a clearly male literary horizon will be signaled by texts that surround it. Wallington's manuscript books remind us that it is not simply gender that determines one's reading and writing culture.
