Background

Purpose

The Corpus of Women’s Instructive Texts in English (CoWITE) was created with a clear and ambitious aim: to provide researchers with access to the voices of women who, across more than three centuries, took up the pen to share their knowledge, experience, and advice in areas often dismissed as ordinary, yet deeply embedded in everyday life and cultural transmission. At its core, CoWITE is designed to support research into how women contributed to the production and circulation of practical knowledge, particularly in domestic and semi-professional domains such as cookery, household management, healthcare, and nutrition. These texts, often written with clarity, care, and authority, remind us that instructional discourse has long been a key site of meaning-making, social positioning, and linguistic creativity.

The corpus also enables the study of linguistic features over time, especially those that shape interpersonal meaning. Researchers can trace historical patterns in modality, stance, politeness, and evaluation, and examine how women framed their authority while managing expectations around appropriateness, humility, and expertise. These strategies were rarely neutral: they reflected and negotiated the gendered norms of each period. In addition, CoWITE offers a foundation for exploring gendered uses of language in technical, culinary, and medical writing, areas where women often found socially sanctioned space to publish, teach, or document procedures. Through these genres, women not only transmitted knowledge but also constructed their own credibility and instructional voice, sometimes modestly, sometimes boldly.

In the line of previous research on historical grounds, CoWITE seeks to honour and analyse these textual legacies. It opens the door to interdisciplinary and linguistically grounded studies that bring renewed attention to the discursive practices of women who shaped the everyday knowledge of their time, often without formal recognition, yet with enduring cultural impact.

Origin of material

The texts included in CoWITE have been retrieved from a combination of digitised archival collections and on-site visits to libraries and repositories. Great care has been taken to ensure that the corpus reflects a wide range of women’s instructional writing from both manuscript and print traditions, spanning local, national, and transatlantic sources. Key sources include: The Wellcome Collection, London; The British Library, London; Trinity College Library, Dublin; The Bodleian Library, Oxford; other national and university libraries across the UK and Ireland; and Google Books and other digitisation platforms for public domain materials. Many of these texts were accessed through digital facsimiles, but others, particularly manuscripts, were consulted in person, allowing for the accurate transcription and verification of structural and paratextual features.

For more information on the texts, see the CoWITE Database: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15571302

Publication status

The CoWITE project is being released in chronologically organised subcorpora, with its decade-based design. Each subcorpus represents a defined temporal slice, allowing researchers to work with linguistically and historically balanced data.

Published: The subcorpora CoWITE18 (1700–1799) and CoWITE19 (1800–1899) are complete and publicly available via both DiCoS-LA and Zenodo. These cover a broad and diverse selection of women’s instructive writing from the 18th and 19th centuries and form the backbone of current CoWITE-based research.
Forthcoming: The earlier subcorpora, CoWITE16 (1550–1599) and CoWITE17 (1600–1699), are currently undergoing final editorial review and metadata refinement. Their publication is expected shortly and will complete the corpus’s diachronic coverage, offering access to some of the earliest known examples of women’s instructive writing in English.

Once complete, the corpus will offer a coherent and richly annotated dataset covering more than 350 years of women’s engagement with knowledge transmission, instructional discourse, and the construction of textual authority.

Notes

The CoWITE corpus forms part of the envisaged macroproject CoWTeE (Corpus of Women’s Texts in English), which aims to document and analyse women’s writing in English from a text-type-based perspective. While CoWITE focuses on instructional discourse, future subcorpora within CoWTeE will represent other major text types, following Werlich’s typology and related discourse models. Each subcorpus will centre on a distinct textual function and bring together historically attested genres that best exemplify that type:

Argumentative: including polemical essays, political tracts, social treatises, and letters to editors
Descriptive: including travel writing, naturalistic catalogues, and household inventories
Narrative: including autobiographical fragments, embedded stories in cookbooks, and instructional anecdotes
Expository: including technical manuals, moral essays, encyclopaedic entries, and scientific overviews authored by women

This design, in our view, allows for functional comparability across corpora while respecting the genre-specific characteristics and historical contexts of women’s writing. CoWTeE builds on CoWITE as its foundational component for instructional writing and aims to offer an informed view of how women, across genres and centuries, shaped knowledge, authority, and self-representation in English.

Metadata and search functionality are continuously updated, contingent on available funding.

Funding information

The research behind CoWITE has been supported by the Agencia Estatal de Investigación within the framework of the Plan Estatal de Investigación Científica, Técnica y de Innovación 2021–2023, under award number PID2021-125928NB-I00. This support has enabled the collection, transcription, annotation, and digital infrastructure necessary for compiling the CoWITE corpus, including its integration into the DiCoS-LA platform and its public release via Zenodo. It has also facilitated archival visits, editorial work, and dissemination of results at both national and international levels.

Research project details:

Title: Los mecanismos interpersonales en los textos instructivos especializados, domésticos y no domésticos, escritos por mujeres en inglés moderno / Interpersonal devices in specialised instructive texts, domestic and non-domestic, written by women in Modern English
Reference: PID2021-125928NB-I00
Duration: 2022–2025
Principal researcher: Francisco J. Alonso-Almeida (Universidad de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria)

The development of DiCoS-LA, in particular, has also been supported by:

The Agencia Canaria de Investigación, Innovación y Sociedad de la Información (ACIISI), Government of the Canary Islands (Project reference: CEI2020-09). Project leader: Dr. Francisco Alonso-Almeida
The Programa INVESTIGO, within the Plan de Recuperación, Transformación y Resiliencia – Next Generation EU, coordinated at ULPGC. Project leader: Dr. Francisco Alonso-Almeida, francisco.alonso@ulpgc.es