SHEWROTE

The underrepresentation of women in cultural historiography has been challenged since the 1970s by a number of feminist responses, including the creation of new or alternative female canons. This project takes this task a step further, and investigates historical sources dating from before ca. 1945 to interrogate how female authors were read in the past. Evidence of readership, translations and commentary is being harvested and made searchable in a database, which serves as a collaborative research tool for the project members, based in countries across Europe. The SHEWROTE database (formerly Women Writers database, Huygens Institute) is currently being redeveloped in partnership with Radboud University’s Humanities Lab. Building on the work undertaken over the past two decades by an international network of 100+ researchers, the SHEWROTE database will allows users to stock, share and analyse historical data documenting the international reception of works by women writers, including evidence of book ownership, readership, re-editions, translations, intertextual references and commentary on (works by) women writers. The database is coordinated by members of the international NEWW Network (New approaches to European Women’s Writing, created in 2005) and the DARIAH-EU working group ‘Women Writers in History’. For more information on this working group, please see DARIAH.EU.