The question of which is more important for understanding early modern women’s writing, manuscript or print, is one which only would have been asked in the last two decades. In traditional literary histories that valorized print and commercial authorship, women’s manuscript works were mentioned as being either incomplete drafts and/or as evidence of the patriarchal culture’s prevention of publication, denying any audience outside the immediate family. These assumptions about the nature and function of early modern manuscript texts began to shift with the revision of the nineteenth-century concept of an author as being an individual genius to a writer working within a network of agents to create, disseminate, and preserve their works. Manuscript texts reveal the strategic use of a competitive media form, one chosen by both male and female writers to gain an audience and to preserve their works. Women chose print for a variety of motives, but few initially for financial reasons. An understanding of the interconnected nature of manuscript and print cultures is therefore essential in understanding early modern women’s writings.