Studying Historical Early Women’s Reception: Oeuvres, Texts, Engagements (SHEWROTE)

The SHEWROTE database is a new iteration of the database formerly known as Women Writers, first conceived by Suzan van Dijk and hosted by Utrecht University between 2001 and 2014 (http://neww.huygens.knaw.nl/) and redeveloped by the Huygens Institute between 2014 and 2023 (for an archived version, without the accompanying text, see: https://womenwriters.rich.ru.nl/womenwriters/vre/persons). The SHEWROTE database has three principal objectives, and also targets three categories of users. It aims to:

1. Provide students and the general public with basic information about women authors, their works and their reception, including also editions and circulations, from a transnational perspective, during the long period roughly from Sappho to Virginia Woolf. Rather than providing narrative closure, it demonstrates that large numbers of women were historically active in the literary field, and had an impact on other writers and readers – thereby inviting casual users to look further into specific cases.
2. Provide literary scholars with a research tool allowing them to make informed transnational comparisons across countries and language areas, some of which they may be unable to access directly themselves, regarding the (international) impact of women writers before circa 1940, or the second feminist wave. The database serves both as research tool and research output, as records created by contributors are clearly credited to them and can be cited in publications and research overviews.
3. Provide readers with a discovery tool pointing toward other resources in the field of women’s literary history, including reliable online editions of texts by and about women. It does so both through references provided in individual Person, Work, Edition and Reception records, and through its union catalogue of databases on women’s writing, which is regularly updated.

The SHEWROTE database records receptions of works by women authors. This means that it includes Person and Work records only when there is an accompanying Reception, or a relation to another author.

The database was from its inception intended primarily as a research instrument, which has since then been fed, and continues to be fed by specific research questions of individual users and the data generated by them. This means that the data is not exhaustive, and coverage per region and period is partial. It is therefore up to individual users to enrich the data where and as necessary for their own research purposes. Should you wish to contribute to the database, please contact alicia.montoya@ru.nl for inlog codes.