Parergon

Introduction: Women’s Agency in Early Modern Europe

Kate Allan — 2024-02-12

Women’s Agency: Then and Now

Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks — 2024-03-06

This article surveys recent thinking about agency as a concept, both in general and within women’s and gender history, and then discusses some of the ways in which women’s agency has figured in early modern cultural and economic history over the last several decades. It considers whether women’s agency might have been a matter of norms as well as actions, that is, whether people expected women to be capable, economically productive, qualified, and skilled while simultaneously ascribing to patriarchal norms about women’s weakness. It highlights several research areas in which women’s agency has been a particularly important theme in recent scholarship and examines arguments about women’s and girls’ agency that have emerged in debates about the role of women’s work in European economic expansion. At the end, it briefly connects early modern developments with some trends in women’s lives that have emerged because of the COVID pandemic.

Seed Lists: Women’s Paperwork and Information Maintenance in Early Modern Global Exchange

Olin Moctezuma-Burns — 2024-02-29

As Europe saw an increase in newly known plants, the seed list format was employed to make specimens legible across an informal network for botanical exchange. This article explores the medium specifications of the format and a rich repository of these lists, compiled by the English aristocrat Mary Somerset (bap. 1630-1715), who dedicated much of her time to maintaining the flows of information that seed lists mediated. This will show the work required to make exchanges meaningful and useful, the credibility and authority this could grant to a woman like Somerset, and significantly, the importance of maintenance in transforming mobile units of information scattered across the world into something we call knowledge.

A ‘Book of Drawings’ and the ‘Writing Pen’: Women Artists’ Self-Teaching and Transnational Print Culture in Early Modern Europe

Mallory Haselberger — 2024-03-06

In early modernity, artistic education began and endured with the student’s drawing practice—first in replicating works from antiquity, then of the master, and finally in the student master’s creation of new invenzione to express artistic command. For women, this learning process was less straightforward. This essay considers the changing nature of women’s artistic education between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, where the book and textual knowledge production come to mark the onset of women’s artistic practice. With case studies exploring artistic texts by Giovanna Garzoni, Élisabeth-Sophie Chéron, and Catherine Perrot, I trace the private means by which women artists utilized rising access to print culture for artistic instruction, commensurate with the growth of printing across Europe.

Universal Verse: The Cosmological Poetics of Anne Southwell

Cassandra Gorman — 2024-03-06

This article explores Southwell’s understanding of the human and specifically female responsibility in making knowledge and contact with the divine, acts that she figures through cosmic movement and, crucially, poetic forms. For Southwell, moving through – and discovering one’s place in – space is part-and-parcel of poetic creation in its broadest sense: writing divinely-informed verse, realising one’s self-potential, and understanding God’s work. I consider Southwell’s approach to writing physical and astronomical encounters via a series of recurring images: the wax ball or tablet, a pliant material ready to take impressions from above; and acts of flight and celestial revolution. Between them, Southwell’s methods for astronomical exploration and poetic gain reveal the capability of poetry and its expansive opportunities for the female writer.

‘Divers voyages into farre countries’: Agency in Rose Throckmorton’s Diary

Emily Stevenson — 2024-03-06

Women played a vital role within mercantile communities in sixteenth century London as social, cultural and economic agents, but there is comparatively little archival material relating to these activities in comparison to their male counterparts, and as they were seldom able to actively participate in trade, the nuances of their activity are easily overlooked. Using the 1610 diary of Rose Lok Hickman Throckmorton as a case study, this article will examine her role within her community and the ways in which she both exerted and subverted agency, interrogating the text’s preoccupations with questions of trade, faith, and gender.

Agents, Acquisitions, and Agency: Queen Christina of Sweden’s Development of Antiquarian Collections in Stockholm and Rome

Theresa A. Kutasz Christensen — 2024-03-06

Queen Christina of Sweden was a prolific collector both as ruler of Sweden and as abdicated queen in Rome. Working for decades to build nearly autonomous antiquities collections in Stockholm and Rome, Christina employed a robust network of art acquisition agents. Correspondence and travel notes between these agents, artists, their associates, and Christina, provide insight into the queen’s reach, ambition, and limitations. This essay takes an intersectional approach to women’s mobility in the early modern antiquities market, illuminating the impact of religion, location, gender, and status on the ancient marble trade across Europe and the transnational networks Christina utilized

‘Wide wandring Weemen’: The Nature and Variety of Female Travel, 1558–1630

Christopher Higgins — 2024-03-06

Female overseas travel has long been viewed as a niche activity involving only a handful of privileged elites. In his book The Traveiler (1575), Jerome Turler cast moral aspersions on female travellers, describing them as ‘wide wandring Weemen’. However, an extensive review of the surviving evidence, drawing on underused sources, including the King’s Remembrancer records and diplomatic correspondence, suggests that European travel by English women was far more widespread than previously acknowledged. This paper surveys the findings of a new database of over 2,100 journeys made by English women to Europe between 1558 and 1630. From this information, it is now possible to construct a more complex understanding both of the extent and nature of female mobility than was previously supposed both by modern historians of travel and earlier commentators such as Jerome Turler.

The Agency of Muslim Women and ‘the Muslimwoman’ in Early Modern England

Bernadette Andrea — 2024-03-06

Acknowledging that women from Muslim backgrounds arrived on British shores well before the first record of an openly Muslim woman in the 1830s, but that they would have had no real option other than to assimilate to English mores, including religious ones, this article investigates the ‘Muslimwoman’ (miriam cooke’s neologism) as constitutive of English culture from the sixteenth century and into the eighteenth century. Examples include representations of elite women from the Ottoman dynasty in histories, polemics, and plays. Deploying ‘the Muslimwoman’ as a heuristic allows us to assess the impact of historical Muslim women on early modern English culture.

After Women’s Agency in Early Modern Europe

Liza Blake — 2024-03-06

This afterward 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 essays in the special issue offer challenges to the concept of agency, or methodologies for thinking beyond agency.

Career Women

Amy Orner — 2024-03-06

How does our current conception of what it means to be a woman artist exclude those who do not fit the traditional definition? This review essay considers Babette Bohn’s Women Artists, Their Patrons, and Their Publics in Early Modern Bologna, Women Artists in the Early Modern Courts of Europe c. 1450-1700, edited by Tanja L. Jones, and By Her Hand: Artemisia Gentileschi and Women Artists in Italy, 1500-1800, edited by Eve Straussman-Pflanzer and Oliver Tostmann in order to draw conclusions about the study of Early Modern women artists. These three books under review address aspects of self-fashioning and female artistic personas that rely on societal influences such as class, marital status, and connections to networks of artistic production and patronage.