Early Modern Women Research Articles

Antigone’s Example: Early Modern Women’s Political Writing in Times of Civil War from Christine de Pizan to Helen Maria Williams by Mihoko Suzuki (review)

Antigone’s Example: Early Modern Women’s Political Writing in Times of Civil War from Christine de Pizan to Helen Maria Williams by Mihoko Suzuki (review)

Coercion or Consent? Women, Property and Legal Authority in Early Modern Scotland

During the early modern period women's ownership of property was significantly constrained by the marital relationship. Scots law stipulated that much of a woman's property passed to her husband on marriage and that her ability to sell, control or dispose of much property without her husband's consent was severely restricted. Yet, despite such strict legal rules, jurists were aware that a married woman could be placed in a difficult position if her husband abused his position, with legal procedures introduced to mitigate a husband's extensive property powers. As a result, a husband could not sell land his wife brought to the marriage, or any land they held jointly, without her consent, indicated by her signature or mark on the deed and her declaration in a private examination that she acted under her own free will and not under coercion or pressure from her husband. This article interrogates the legal requirement of the wife's consent in Scots law from two conflicting positions: first, as a restraint on the husband's administrative powers in that she was entitled to openly challenge a mortgage or sale; and second, as an endorsement of the husband's superior position in that she was most likely unable to publicly challenge her husband's patriarchal authority during his lifetime. In doing so, it argues that women's legal authority in early modern Scotland was complex and, at times, contradictory, and that this legal ambiguity entitled the courts to make decisions that routinely looked beyond fixed rules when women's property rights and patriarchal rules overlapped.

THE PORTRAIT OF A WOMAN POET IN LADY MARY WROTH’S PAMPHILIA TO AMPHILANTUS

Lady Mary Wroth is considered to be one of the most prominent women writers of the Early Modern Period. She comes from the Sidney family, the members of which are well-known with their noteworthy literary accomplishments. Wroth’s Pamphilia to Amphilanthus has a significant place among the sonnet sequences and early modern women’s poetry as it is “the first sonnet sequence to be composed by an Englishwomen” (Roberts, 1982, p. 43). The Petrarchan tradition with its determined roles of a male poet and an idealized lady, along with its blazons employed to express the consequences of unfulfilled love and desire can hardy accommodate a woman who comes up with such an unaccustomed role. This article, therefore, aims at a study of Pamphilia to Amphilanthus, as a sonnet sequence to see how a woman poet manages to employ the sonnet tradition in her own way. How Wroth as a woman poet accommodated herself and her persona to the poetic tradition of the time will be the main point of argumentation. It is in this respect that, the focus will be on Pamphilia and how she is represented with a new role. She is depicted as a woman with a voice, talking about her experience and the destructive outcomes of grief, quite often questioning the nature of love. Pamphilia appears not as the silent object of some other poet’s work, but writing her own poems, metaphorically redefining her place in the literary production. Furthermore, Wroth’s choice of genre, how she employed and revised it, the role she assigned to the female speaker, the major themes, along with her ideas on writing as a woman poet will be further elaborated on.

WOMEN IN THE HISTORY OF THE EARLY MODERN TIME – OUTSTANDING PERSONALITIES OF THE DRUGETH FAMILY (II)

Due to the development of the science of history and the research on the „female theme”, the way of looking at the past and the future is also undergoing a significant change. In our study, through the study of general and specific examples, we would like to present the social conditions in which aristocratic women lived, worked, gave birth, raised children, and managed estates in the second half of the 17th century. Many of them can be said to have withstood the difficult conditions of those times in an exemplary manner. In the society of those times, all people had their own duties and responsibilities with regard to their gender and age. In this study, we examine what opportunities were available to early modern aristocratic women in terms of social and community relations, family life and building a marriage inserted into the historical events of those times. We complete it by examining the life paths and career models of the women who entered the Homonnai Drugeth family through marriage, highlighting various aspects of their lives. From the reader’s point of view, it may seem excessive to outline the social conditions of those times, however, without knowledge of them, the formulation of women’s roles of those times may be incomplete. In the second half of the 17th century, the religious structure of the region also changed significantly, so the aristocratic women of those times (unlike their predecessors) already supported the spread of re-Catholicization. What roles did the aristocratic women of that period play in contemporary Hungarian society and in their narrower environment? The framework for this was mainly set by her family and the inherited relationship system into which she was born. In accordance with social expectations, the aristocratic woman of those times increased the prestige of her family through marriage as well as ensured financial security of her future descendants with a prosperous marriage. Since women did not (could not) participate widely and officially in the formation of politics and everyday public life, there are much fewer and more diverse sources about them than about men. In these, we can find references to them mainly as wives, daughters, brides and mothers. Despite this (precisely due to their social status), women also had a significant informal influence on political life. That is why it is important to study the life path of women of those times, because without this knowledge our image of the society of those times would be incomplete. The present study may become one of the important building blocks, which, in addition to supplementing incomplete biographical data, will try to present the social roles played by these women. The article is a continuation of a scientific study devoted to the current problem - the analysis of the role of women of noble origin in the early modern period in the socio-political and socio-economic relations of the northeastern part of the Hungarian Kingdom. The article summarizes the study new aspects of the family history through the unknown moments of the life path of the Drugeth women (Katalin Nádasdy, Anna Jakusich, Mária Esterházi Mária, Terézia Keglevich) and new give aspects of the family's history.

Susan North. Sweet and Clean? Bodies and Clothes in Early Modern England.

Susan North’s Sweet and Clean? Bodies and Clothes in Early Modern England offers a trove of information about clothing in early modern England: how it was made, washed, worn, recycled, repaired, and more. There is also a significant long-overdue discussion of underwear. What are the differences between flax and hemp? A man’s smock versus a woman’s shift? Sweet and Clean is an invaluable resource for anyone interested in the practical household work of making, sewing, and washing clothes, as well as the history of bodies, health, and hygiene. The book is framed around a clear key finding: early modern men and women bathed. This argument may seem commonplace, but in actuality it is a significant historiographical revision. The prevailing belief, until now, has been that Europeans did not wash themselves frequently. They cleaned only their visible outer layers of clothing, which came to represent propriety, leaving their bodies and innermost layers of linen untouched. North revises this long-held misconception by showing that Englishmen and women did indeed wash their bodies and their clothes, and she provides a multitude of details demonstrating how and why they did so.

:Early Modern Women’s Complaint: Gender, Form, and Politics

:<i>Early Modern Women’s Complaint: Gender, Form, and Politics</i>

Early Modern Women and Race: State of the Study

Early Modern Women and Race: State of the Study

Janel Mueller, 1938–2022

Previous articleNext article FreeObituaryJanel Mueller, 1938–2022Joshua ScodelJoshua ScodelHelen A. Regenstein Professor of English, University of Chicago Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreCourtesy of Hanna Holborn Gray Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library.View Large ImageDownload PowerPointI am deeply honored to pay tribute to Janel Mueller, who died on October 21, 2022. From 1988 to 1998 Janel edited Modern Philology with a characteristic blend of broad vision and incisive attention to detail. As a journal editor, award-winning teacher, and inspiring mentor of younger scholars, Janel energetically advanced literary scholarship by nurturing and improving the work of others. I gratefully remember many drafts of my own work in progress laden with her acute blue-penciled suggestions.The fitting coeditor of the 2002 Cambridge History of Early Modern English Literature, Janel was a magnificent scholar of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English literature. She combined immense erudition, particularly in the history of Christian thought; passionate dedication to expanding our literary canon by revealing the expressive power of underestimated early modern women authors and religious writings; and bold yet historically contextualized accounts of what made individual authors and texts new in style, argument, and vision. With rigorous stylistics grounded in linguistics, Janel’s Native Tongue and the Word (1984) traced with revisionary vigor how Protestant scripturalism and the imitation of biblical parallelism shaped early modern English prose, which had previously been analyzed in relation to classical models or modern science.Throughout her career Janel focused with piercing intensity on two major male authors, Donne and Milton. Attentive to Donne’s sources but above all to his ever-surprising imagination, Janel published as her first book an edition of Donne’s prebend sermons (1971) and as her last an Oxford selection of his oeuvre (2018). Janel was at the forefront of scholarship exploring early modern constructions of gender, and her numerous publications on Donne include her learned, brilliant, and influential 1992 article articulating Donne’s lesbian utopianism in “Sapho to Philaenis.” Her many articles on Milton included important 1980s and 1990s analyses of his reinvention of the political sonnet and of his first prose tract’s radical reformulation of English apocalypticism and vanguard articulation, well before other scholars had recognized it, of a “nascent English republicanism.”In numerous editions and articles, Janel examined how early modern English women authors found their literary voices by engaging with scripture and with traditions previously defined by men. Her 1994 article elucidating the way that Aemilia Lanyer’s 1611 Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum reimagined Christ’s crucifixion in gendered terms was characteristically revelatory. Having coedited Elizabeth I’s writings and translations (2000–2009), in 2011 Janel published her magisterial edition of the writings of Elizabeth’s stepmother Katherine Parr, the first Englishwoman to publish a work of her own under her own name. Janel’s luminous introductions and copious notes revealed precisely how and why Parr produced a distinctive feminine vision of reformed spiritual devotion. Her praise of Parr’s “richly expressive legacy” might fittingly be applied to Janel’s own scholarship, the enduring expression of an unforgettable mind. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 120, Number 3February 2023 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/723649 © 2023 The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

New Work on Early Modern Women

New Work on Early Modern Women

After Women’s Agency in Early Modern Europe

Abstract: This afterword to the special issue on ‘Women’s Agency in Early Modern Europe’ takes up the question of agency from a posthumanist perspective, asking not how we can expand or extend the concept of agency beyond the (male) human, but instead whether we as scholars of early modern women might not be in a position to consider ourselves ‘after’ a focus on agency. It explores challenges to the overvaluation of agency, and reviews different ways the articles in the special issue offer challenges to the concept of agency, or methodologies for thinking beyond agency.

:Writing Habits: Historicism, Philosophy, and English Benedictine Convents, 1600–1800

:<i>Writing Habits: Historicism, Philosophy, and English Benedictine Convents, 1600–1800</i>

The textual terrain: developments and directions in women's writing, 1500–1700

AbstractThis article assesses our much-expanded view of the texts produced by early modern women in Ireland, surveying what is available to present-day researchers and considering emerging methodologies for the analysis of early modern female voices. The range of genres with which we now know early modern women engaged owes much to feminist literary historians’ capacious approach to defining literature, expanding beyond traditionally elite genres (drama, poetry, fiction) to encompass writing in all its forms. Thus, the present corpus includes letters and petitions, life writing, devotional prose, legal depositions, as well as all kinds of verse and song, in multiple languages. Moreover, where the primary evidence in Ireland sometimes seems sparse, international perspectives have illuminated the currents of women's writing. Interpretative paradigms from other fields — book history and the history of reading, culinary and medical history, network analysis — are being applied to yield fresh insights about this material. The question of how early modern Ireland was experienced by women has been explored in studies that address such texts as articulations of subjectivity, in the light of the history of emotions. The wide range of situations and genres of women's writing in early modern Ireland is now firmly evident, inspiring a host of new approaches.

Progress, challenges and opportunities in early modern gender history, c.1550–1720

AbstractFollowing some of the themes of the original ‘An agenda for women's history in Ireland, 1500–1900’ and others that were not as prominent, this article considers progress since 1992 and highlights opportunities for the further development of Irish early modern women's and gender history. It considers aspects of the life cycle of women and men, especially birth, youth and marriage; the economic roles of women, especially when it came to work and property; and the importance of movement to and from Ireland in both personal biographies and wider contexts. It also reflects on some of the ways in which understandings of early modern politics and of religion and belief for the period c.1550–1720 have been transformed by consideration of the role of women. While the ‘Agenda’ noted the potential of buildings and spaces, there has been a new emphasis on ‘things’ as remnants of lives and labour, expressions of cultural norms and tools in the construction of gender, selfhood and social status. Very early on, the ‘Agenda’ strongly stated that ‘the history of women is also the history of men’, and this article also notes the green shoots of the history of masculinity in early modern Ireland.

“They Have Been United As Sisters”: Women Leaders and Political Power in Black Lay Confraternities of Colonial Lima

AbstractIn Lima in the seventeenth century, both free and enslaved black women held elected leadership roles in black confraternities (corporate bodies of lay Catholics). These women occupied a public position generally reserved for men; their Spanish and indigenous counterparts did not hold comparable roles. Though their experiences have not been documented in scholarly literature, they were highly visible in their own lifetimes. In ecclesiastical court, they acted as the confraternity's legal agents. In everyday operations, they were primarily responsible for collecting and managing funds. This gave them a large say in how money ought to be spent, whether on festivals, members’ funerals, medical aid, or financial support for imprisoned members. Though black limeños made up a majority of the city's population, other forms of mutual aid were often inaccessible to them. Confraternity leaders in general, and these women in particular, managed one of their community's only officially recognized spaces for civic organization. As the century wore on, men successfully challenged the women's authority in court, and militia officers became more and more central to leadership. Yet even with that curtailment, these positions gave black women in Lima a degree of publicly acknowledged power highly unusual for early modern women.

Where was women’s work? Gender, work and urban space in Amsterdam, 1650–1791

ABSTRACT This article considers the spatial dimension of the gendered urban division of labour. The location of early modern women’s work is investigated through a database of work activities gathered from early modern notarial depositions. Work is here defined broadly as all activities that contribute towards making a living. Women’s (and men’s) work happening inside, outside, at home and away from home in early modern Amsterdam is charted and the complex layers of domesticity and mobility that connect closely to women’s everyday access to the streets are discussed. Women’s labour and the gendered division of work is described in detail, not per specialized sector but as an issue of the general gendered geography of work. The results show strong gendered differences but no strict separations of gendered spheres: although more men worked outside and more women worked inside, we also found men working at home and women working outside, although notably not as much. The major finding is that women did not increasingly work from home, but that men decreasingly did so.

A Resounding God: Acoustic Representations of the Divine in Early Modern Women’s Spiritual Writing

A Resounding God: Acoustic Representations of the Divine in Early Modern Women’s Spiritual Writing

VOLUME 52 (2022)

VOLUME 52 (2022)

‘On Sitting Down to Read Katherine Philips Once Again – with Margaret Alexander, in the State Library of Victoria, Courtesy of the Emmerson Collection.’

ABSTRACT This essay analyses a copy of Katherine Philips’s 1667 folio that is in the Emmerson Collection, in The State Library of Victoria (Australia). Through a careful account of the provenance of the volume, the essay explores the transmission of this book, beginning with the intriguing female signature on the flyleaf. This analysis intersects with recent issues in Book History and in the positioning of early modern women’s writing in relation to the material turn in early modern studies.

Self‐absorption and performance in Tanci fiction: Eighteenth‐century Chinese conceptions of identity in comparative perspective

AbstractThis article provides an analysis of Zaishengyuan, an eighteenth‐century romance authored by Chen Duansheng, who exemplifies the ways in which early modern Chinese women entered the field of prose fiction. Alienated from the vernacular novel, literary women in eighteenth‐century China were channelled into tanci, a genre of narrative fiction connected to romances and manuscript culture. With exuberant representations of female cross‐dressing and many other forms of self‐transformation, Zaishengyuan experiments with radical conceptions of individual identity as discontinuous and self‐determined. It illuminates a social ecology of fiction writing that both differs from and resonates with that in eighteenth‐century Europe.

Women and the History of Samuel Pepys's Diary

AbstractThrough focusing on the lives of women, this article examines silences and obfuscations in Samuel Pepys's diary and in the histories we tell about this most famous of Restoration sources. It begins by considering how the ways we read the diary today remain influenced by Pepys's decisions when preserving his papers. While his diary has increasingly been studied for what it reveals about early modern sex and/or women's lives, historians have faced difficulties in assessing and representing this content, partly because of measures devised by Pepys. Knowledge of his methods, together with close reading, can help us attend to what this source omits and elides. Historiography has often followed Pepys's lead when discussing his diary's sexual content, and it has also followed his lead in researching his kin. His father's family has been tracked over generations; meanwhile, basic facts about his mother and her family have remained unknown. The article traces Pepys's maternal kin, comparing new evidence with the diary's representation of social status and kinship networks. Pepys's diary is a vital source on the seventeenth century, but fully exploiting that source requires factoring in Pepys's methods of writing and preservation, and attending to what has gone unwritten.