Is There Room for Judith Shakespeare and Her Brother, Too?

This essay considers the future of scholarship on early modern women writers in light of structural issues in the twenty-first-century academy. By drawing upon a dataset comprising 21,053 scholarly works (books, book chapters, articles, doctoral dissertations, editions, and translations), it quantifies the relationship between scholarship on early modern women and the field at large. It pays particular attention to Shakespeare and his outsize influence. The essay advances two major claims: first, that even scholars without a particular interest in women or gender must become informed about women’s diverse contributions to literate culture and, second, that early modernists must decide what we would like our contracting field to be and what values we will collectively embrace