Putting the auto in the auto de fe

Buried in the miscellaneous writings of Capuchin abbess Sor María Ángela Astorch (1592-1665) is a curious spiritual exercise the author calls ‘teatro santo’. In it, Sor María, never herself investigated by the Inquisition, imagines herself as a priest being sentenced to death in an auto de fe. The exercise is practised in total solitude, but also requires props and costume. Sor María inhabits various identities and voices in her account, moving freely between genders and roles, as well as between her embodied identity and her imagined ones. This article argues that the ‘teatro santo’, while singular in its particulars, may give insight into how a female public reacted to the diverse genres of performance that characterize the Spanish Baroque. Sor María’s identification with multiple ‘characters’, and her creative self-insertion into the narrative, shows how early modern women could cultivate creative freedom within, and without disturbing, the most restrictive spaces.

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Anne Conway’s Response to Cartesianism

The Oxford Handbook of Descartes and Cartesianism ◽

10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198796909.013.44 ◽

2019 ◽

pp. 706-720

Author(s):

Christia Mercer

Keyword(s):

Seventeenth Century ◽

Modern Philosophy ◽

Early Modern ◽

History Of Philosophy ◽

Early Modern Women ◽

History Of ◽

Radical Ideas ◽

Insight Into

Anne Conway (1631–79) was an English philosopher whose only work, The Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy, was published posthumously in 1690. Conway’s arguments against Descartes’s account of matter constitute a cutting criticism of his views and offer significant insight into an important and under-studied anti-Cartesian trend in the second half of the seventeenth century. Conway’s response to Descartes helps us discern some of the more original and radical ideas in her philosophy. Like so many other significant early modern women, Conway was left out of the history of philosophy by later thinkers.

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Originality, Plagiarism, and Posthumous Publication: Grace Gethin’s Reliquiæ Gethinianæ (1699)

The Review of English Studies ◽

10.1093/res/hgaa094 ◽

2020 ◽

Author(s):

Ben Wilkinson-Turnbull

Keyword(s):

Early Modern ◽

Francis Bacon ◽

Early Modern Women ◽

Prose Romance ◽

Complex Methods ◽

Insight Into

Abstract This article explores early modern ideas of originality by reconsidering the critical treatment of one of the first printed female-authored volumes of essays in English: Grace, Lady Gethin’s Misery’s Virtues Whet-stone. Reliquiæ Gethinianæ (1699). Previous scholars of Gethin’s work have used her unacknowledged intertextual borrowings from writers such as Francis Bacon and Joseph Hall to deride her work as unoriginal, plagiaristic, and uninteresting. By comparing Gethin’s essays to her source texts, this article reads Reliquiæ Gethinianæ’s intertextuality as a revealing insight into practices of commonplacing, the literary tastes of early modern women, and the importance of attending to unexceptional readers. It also attempts to reconstruct the intentions behind newly uncovered post-print editing of Reliquiæ Gethinianæ by Gethin’s mother. Manuscript citations made by Frances, Lady Norton in carefully selected copies of Reliquiæ Gethinianæ demonstrate the complex methods used to cultivate and maintain the integrity of Gethin’s posthumous reputation: highlighting her immersion in prestigious scholarly sources, and tactfully downplaying her reliance on Madeleine de Scudéry’s less reputable epic prose romance Clelia (1654–1660).

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