Women’s book ownership in early modern Denmark: a quantitative approach

This article examines the seventeenth-century private library of the Danish noblewoman Karen Brahe (1657–1736). Surviving intact, the collection's contents have been carefully catalogued, offering an entry point into the world of female book owners and users in earlier times. Through quantitative analysis of the digitally encoded bibliographic metadata of the library's catalogue of printed items, this article identifies large-scale patterns across the collection and demonstrates how female book owners in Denmark were connected through their reading to broader European book markets and networks, mapping the interplay between production, distribution, and reception that shaped the book ownership and intellectual life of women in the past.