IV.New Roles in Uncertain Times(1):Women in the Bo...
Publishing,like so many other trades in seventeenth-century England,was officially closed to women.Women were not allowed to become members of the Stationers’Company,the body which officially regulated the publishing trade during this period.Nonetheless,historians of publishing have long realised that some women did have an active role in the seventeenth-century book trade:not only in the more lowly occupations such as hawking(selling books and broadsides in the street)but also in more important and influential roles,as printers and publishers in their own right.This is attested both by numerous surviving title pages which name women as either printers or publishers and also by occasional records in the registers of the Stationers’Company.[21]In most cases,a woman gained a position in the book trade through inheritance—that is,she inherited a printing or publishing business from a deceased husband—and a common seventeenthcentury pattern saw a woman temporarily taking over her husband's business after his death,only to surrender it to a second husband very soon afterwards.Almost invariably this second husband would have been an apprentice in the firm,and thus would have been trained by the woman's first husband.Older scholarship,indeed,was typically inclined to minimise a woman's role in the book trade even in the period when she was nominally in charge of the businesses she had inherited.The assumption was that,although theoretically independent,the woman would merely have been continuing the business practices already established by her first husband,perhaps under the direction of her male apprentice and prospective second husband.
More recent research,however,has questioned this view.Maureen Bell's pioneering study of the publisher Hannah Allen,for instance,indicates not only that Allen's five years at the head of a publishing business inherited from her first husband saw her acting on her own initiative and developing an established business in distinctively new directions,but also that—more pertinently for this paper—these new directions involved her in responding—and thereby contributing—to important contemporary debates in both religion and politics.[22]Hannah Howse—whose birth family also seems to have been involved in the book trade—was married in 1632 to Benjamin Allen,a bookseller who had just one year previously obtained the freedom of the Stationers’Company.Benjamin Allen had a bookshop on Pope's Head Alley,later to be known as the centre of puritan publishing in London,and the books he published were typically puritan(often Independent)in sympathy.When Benjamin died in 1646,after fourteen years of marriage,Hannah inherited the business—which then included an apprentice of three years’standing,Livewell Chapman.From 1646 until 1651,when she married Chapman,Hannah Allen was in sole charge of the business,responsible for choosing the books and authors she wanted to publish and the printers she trusted to work for her.
It is difficult to imagine a more dramatic time in English history for a woman to gain control of a publishing business.1646-51 was an extraordinarily turbulent and varied period,in which many competing sects,factions and ideologies attempted to spread their ideas through the medium of print.As Bell points out:
The five years of[Hannah Allen's]career span the second Civil War,the defeat of the Levellers,Pride's Purge and the execution of the King.Most significantly,it was during this time that groups within the sectarian community,especially the Baptists,were hardening their millenarian position into the stance which became known as Fifth Monarchism.[23]
However,it is not simply the case that Hannah Allen's five years of marital and commercial independence coincided with a particularly momentous period in English politics.The commercial area in which Allen was involved—the book trade—did not merely reflect political developments,it also contributed to them.As Bell puts it:
The works sold by and printed for Hannah Allen should not simply be seen against this political and religious background:they are themselves part of the several debates then in progress about the relations of church and state,the vision of the future,and the possibilities opened up during the previous six years for radical change.[24]
Benjamin Allen had favoured authors and topics from the puritan/radical end of the religio-political spectrum.During her five years in charge of the family business,Hannah Allen took the process of radicalisation still further.The authors she promoted included preachers of a younger generation and a more radical disposition,as well as the most politically extreme of the ministers who preached before Parliament.In a period when an unusually wide spectrum of religious opinion was free to preach and publish,Hannah Allen concentrated exclusively on authors of Independent,Baptist,or millenarian views.[25]Furthermore,a high proportion of the religious texts published by Allen were first publications by their respective authors.[26]Allen was thus responsible for introducing a number of distinctive new voices into the sphere of print:voices which in each case were articulate and controversial.
While Hannah Allen's practice as a publisher does not mark a complete break with the patterns established by her first husband,the titles she published do imply,and represent,a set of commercial choices.The particular circumstances of the Civil War,which allowed a wider than usual range of political opinions to be expressed,thus made available a wider than usual range of potential texts and authors to publishers such as Hannah Allen.Thus the Civil War made it possible for Hannah Allen to become an innovative and influential publisher.Her influence,in turn,was one of the many factors which helped to shape the political ideas and events of the age.