Abstract
Reviewed by: Liise Lehtsalu, Brown University, Providence, RI, USA
This volume is ‘about women’s location and movements in the early modern world’ (11). The 15 essays by historians, art historians and literary scholars all underscore the constructed and gendered nature of space. Collectively they call upon the reader to reflect on the meaning of space in early modernity, but also in the epistemology of the scholars of early modernity.
The volume opens with three methodological and historiographical essays on space in feminist theory and scholarship of gender in the early modern world. In her provocative contribution, Valerie Traub surveys feminist theory since the mid-1980s, dividing it into four main directions that view gender as relational and diacritical, performative, a category of analysis and interpretation, and finally, as intersectional, when gender interacts with other identities. Traub sees early modernists as being challenged in particular by intersectionality: the need to consider the historicity of the various conceptual identity categories (gender, race, class, religion, sexuality, ability) and to move beyond dyadic analysis in order to consider how identity categories work through one another. In the process, Traub calls attention to similarities between the spatial epistemologies of early modernity and the spatial epistemologies by which scholars seek to study early modernity. The historiographical reviews by Merry Wiesner-Hanks and Charlene Villaseñor Black also draw attention to the spatial epistemologies of early modernists. Wienser-Hanks reviews the still limited intersection of global history and the history of gender and sexuality. Villaseñor Black discusses the slow uptake and limited use of gender as an analytic category in the art historical scholarship of the early modern Hispanic world.
The next group of essays turns to the theme of embodied environments. Gerhild Scholz Williams and Tara Pedersen focus on the relationship between body and space. Physical bodies occupy space and the perceived characteristics of a body – gender or reputation, for example – either expanded or delimited the space that an early modern body occupied or through which it moved. Space could also shape identities, as the comparative essay on Dutch and English fishwives by Alena Buis and her co-authors demonstrates. Pamela M. Jones studies the decorations erected for Teresa of Avila’s beatification in the church of S. Maria della Scala in Rome to tease out the environment imagined for a seventeenth-century holy woman. This environment was, on the one hand, highly local and delimited but, on the other hand, global. The Elizabethan gardens analysed by Sara L. French underscore the function of an early modern environment in announcing social and political ambitions.
The third group of essays examines the physical and conceptual spaces inhabited by early modern women. Elizabeth A. Lehfeldt begins the section with a necessary call to recognize that ‘enclosed nuns were the exception and not the rule’ (211) in seventeenth-century Catholicism, thus challenging current historiography that conceptualizes early modern convents as enclosed spaces. An example of this historiography is immediately provided by Kimberlyn Montford, who considers enclosure central to female monasticism in her study of women’s networks in early modern Roman convents. Jennifer Kolpacoff Deane and her co-authors also study women’s networks, exploring households and religious communities as cross-generational female spaces and loci of imagined or real female kinship structures. John Garrison and his co-authors also call attention to female spaces and communities that, they argue, gave women a voice and agency and thus threatened masculine authority in early modern societies.
The final section of the volume explores the gendered spaces created, or denied, by the globalizing early modern world. Ann Christensen and Bernadette Andrea study travel and inter-cultural encounters. Christensen highlights a conflict between early modern English marriage manuals and travel guides, which, on the one hand, did not account for prolonged absences of the husband from the marital household but, on the other hand, failed to consider the existence of a wife in discourses of trade and travel. Christensen proposes the category of ‘unpartnered wives’ to study such women whose lived experiences were marked by effects of an emerging, early modern global economy. Finally, Sheila T. Cavanagh turns to diachronical encounters as she traces the many early modern and contemporary narratives about Amy Robsart’s death.
Collectively, essays in this volume call the reader to reflect on space in early modernity. Importantly, however, the reader is left to ponder not only the relationships between space and bodily boundaries or the conflicts between material and virtual gendered spaces in early modernity. Rather, the volume effectively highlights our role as scholars, as well as our epistemology in shaping the questions we ask and the kind of scholarship we write. ‘New disciplinary and geographic connections, as well as new spaces and routes for sharing our ideas, will no doubt change these in the future’, writes Merry Wiesner-Hanks (11). This volume goes a long way in encouraging such new connections and the new scholarship that will result from them.