Authorizing Early Modern European Women

10.5117/9789463727143 ◽

2021 ◽

Keyword(s):

Early Modern ◽

Historical Fiction ◽

Visual Artists ◽

Early Modern Women ◽

Historical Figures ◽

European Women

The essays in this volume analyze strategies adopted by contemporary novelists, playwrights, screenwriters, and biographers interested in bringing the stories of early modern women to modern audiences. It also pays attention to the historical women creators themselves, who, be they saints or midwives, visual artists or poets and playwrights, stand out for their roles as active practitioners of their own arts and for their accomplishments as creators. Whether they delivered infants or governed as monarchs, or produced embroideries, letters, paintings or poems, their visions, the authors argue, have endured across the centuries. As the title of the volume suggests, the essays gathered here participate in a wider conversation about the relation between biography, historical fiction, and the growing field of biofiction (that is, contemporary fictionalizations of historical figures), and explore the complicated interconnections between celebrating early modern women and perpetuating popular stereotypes about them.

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The Youth of Early Modern Women

10.5117/9789462984325 ◽

2018 ◽

Keyword(s):

Material Culture ◽

Early Modern ◽

Lived Experiences ◽

Primary Sources ◽

Conduct Literature ◽

The Novel ◽

Early Modern Women ◽

European Culture ◽

Cultural Constructions ◽

European Women

Through fifteen essays that work from a rich array of primary sources, this collection makes the novel claim that early modern European women, like men, had a youth. European culture recognised that, between childhood and full adulthood, early modern women experienced distinctive physiological, social, and psychological transformations. Drawing on two mutually shaped layers of inquiry — cultural constructions of youth and lived experiences — these essays exploit a wide variety of sources, including literary and autobiographical works, conduct literature, judicial and asylum records, drawings, and material culture. The geographical and temporal ranges traverse England, Ireland, Italy, France, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Spain, and Mexico from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century. This volume brings fresh attention to representations of female youth, their own life writings, young women’s training for adulthood, courtship, and the emergent sexual lives of young unmarried women.

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