Announces the winner of the Best Article Prize for Volume 14 (2019–20) Erica Heinsen-Roach A Communal Affair: Women, Captivity, and Redemption in the Seventeenth-Century Mediterranean Erica Heinsen-Roach's "A Communal Affair: Women, Captivity, and Redemption in the Seventeenth-Century Mediterranean" is an exemplary essay that brings to 1the fore the "less visible but equally important" Dutch women w0ho actively mobilized the networks of Mediterranean trade, conflict, and captivity even if they did not travel beyond their homeland. Drawing on untapped archival sources concerning Dutch redemption efforts and reading them from a gendered perspective, Heinsen-Roach establishes that Dutch women both managed their households, often under considerable duress, and mobilized resources to advocate for their husbands, fathers, and sons held captive abroad. She illuminates Dutch women's involvement in "the Malta exchange," which was a hub for transfers of ransoms and captives between Christian Europe and Muslim North Africa. Vividly bringing to life these seventeenth-century Dutch women's efforts, she fleshes out a neglected aspect of the history of the early modern Mediterranean trade by affirming the importance of gender as a category of analysis. Click for larger view View full resolution [End Page i] Erica Heinsen-Roach Visiting Assistant Professor of History University of South Florida, St. Petersburg Copyright © 2020 Arizona Board of Regents for Arizona State University

[Extract] This essay explores the performative capacity of chess for the sixteenth-century French queen and regent, Catherine de' Medici. It argues that ludic activities such as chess, along with other games and pastimes at court, must be understood in their gendered political context. A number of scholars have considered whether the replacement of the vizier piece by a queen, the increased mobility of this game piece over the Middle Ages, and the connection to women in the sixteenth-century version of the game's name in various European languages (such as scacchi de la dama and les eschecs de la dame enragee) may have reflected changing perceptions about powerful women at European courts in the period.1 However, such shifts need not be attached to the visibility of specific women to be of significance to gender analyses of early modern power. Courts were intense political environments that brought together women and men and required the development of a range of activities to promote conduct that reinforced hierarchies. Courtly play was, therefore, a performance of power.