SSEMWG: List of Award Winners 2020
Book Award:
Winner:
Christine Walker, Jamaica Ladies: Female Slaveholders and the Creation of Britain’s Atlantic Empire (North Carolina, 2020).
The work that wins this year’s Book Award is Christine Walker’s Jamaica Ladies: Female Slaveholders and the Creation of Britain’s Atlantic Empire. This timely study engages with a familiar topic–gender and enslavement–in innovative and challenging ways. This monograph advances the field of early modern women and gender studies by setting broad but thoroughly evidenced new stakes, and it will make an impact beyond the narrow reaches of disciplinary and national boundaries. Not only does it add to the research that counterbalances the focus on hypermasculine power structures in Atlantic slavery, but it pushes us to examine women’s roles in transatlantic economies of human chattel both “inside” and “outside” enslavement. Whereas many studies focus on enslaved women of African descent or free white slaveholding women of European descent, this study insists on mixing categories of women: African, European, and mixed race; enslaved and enslaver; married and unmarried mothers; poor and rich, documenting those who lived on both sides of these dichotomies in one lifetime. Walker’s case studies complicate our assessment of early modern women’s agency at the radically shifting and unstable intersection of race, gender, class, colorism, and culture. The work evidences the very practices that the field so often and enthusiastically underscores in early modern women – most notably, strategies of self-legitimation – being applied to coercive and exploitative ends. This book shows us how one individual could–at different times–be an exploited commodity in the British economy of slavery and later be a “weaver” of that very system. In addition to being skillfully and engagingly written, Jamaica Ladies invites analysis of moral ambiguity, collects archival evidence of liminal women’s lives, and demonstrates the need for similar studies to be conducted in other Atlantic archives.
Honorable Mention:
Melinda Gough, Dancing Queen: Marie de Médicis’s Ballets at the Court of Henri IV (Toronto, 2019)
Honorable Mention is awarded to Melinda Gough for Dancing Queen: Marie de Médicis’s Ballets at the Court of Henri IV. One of the strengths of this well-crafted and thoroughly researched volume lies in its true interdisciplinary appeal. Bridging performance studies, literary analysis, social history, political rhetoric, and patronage studies across a wealth of sources, Gough examines early modern queenship through the prism of dance in a reign whose ballets de courhave previously gone underexamined. Her study traces woman-centered power negotiations through cultural interventions in court life and its high-stakes entertainments, considering the manner in which textual allegory and brilliantly moving bodies—including the queen’s own—together helped Marie navigate, resist, or dictate political forces. The breadth of Gough’s scholarship shows in her ability to link seemingly disparate cultural domains such as ballet and war, allusions to Italian commedia dell’arte and French diplomacy, and the demands of both maternity and ceremony.
Essay or Article Award:
Winner:
Julia Rombough, “Noisy Soundscapes and Women’s Institutions in Early Modern Florence,” The Sixteenth Century Journal 50.2 (2019): 449- 469.
This ground-breaking article examines the regulation of sound adjacent to convents, charity houses and reform houses, in order to control the spaces of nuns, former sex workers, and penitents. The author shows how contemporary discourses of health and female honor underpinned an understanding of sonic assault as bodily assault, and of noise as indicative of scandalous behavior. The city’s soundscape is revealed as an unstable terrain that provokes yet inevitably disrupts efforts to police social hierarchies, as well as distinctions between the public and institutional, pure and impure, healthy and non-healthy.
Edition Awards: (NOTE: the teaching edition award was not given this year)
Josephine Roberts Award Winner:
Verina Jones, From Arcadia to Revolution: The Neapolitan Monitor and Other Writings (Toronto, 2019).
The Society for the Study of Early Modern Women presents the 2020 Josephine Roberts Award for a Scholarly Edition to Verina Jones for From Arcadia to Revolution: The Neapolitan Monitor and Other Writings. Jones’s critical edition and translation of selections of the literary and political writings by Eleonora Fonseca Pimentel are a significant contribution to women’s and gender studies as well as to the revolutionary age and radical ideology of the late eighteenth century. In an elegant and extensive introduction, Jones situates Fonseca Pimentel’s life, political engagement, and work in the complicated historical context of Bourbon-ruled Naples and the Jacobin Neapolitan Republic of 1799. With clarity and vision, Jones also addresses the contested feminist canons of Fonseca Pimentel’s writings by repositioning them within a socio-political as well as feminist traditions. Jones rectifies Fonseca Pimentel’s seeming lack of concern for women. She argues that, contrary to her contemporary defenders of the rights of women, Fonseca Pimentel’s emphasis was on class identity and on women of the lower classes. In her writings, Fonseca Pimentel envisioned a future which included all women and men as citizens of the Republic. With From Arcadia to Revolution Jones has brought to the attention of students and the wider public a neglected yet fascinating aristocratic, journalist, poet, opinion maker, and Jacobin revolutionary woman.
Scholarly Edition in Translation Award Winner:
Aurora Wolfgang, edition and translation of Gabrielle-Suzann Barbot de Villeneuse’s Beauty and the Beast: The Original Story (Toronto, 2019).
The Society for the Study of Early Modern Women presents the 2020 Award for a Scholarly Edition in Translation to Aurora Wolfgang who edited and translated Gabrielle-Suzann Barbot de Villeneuse’s Beauty and the Beast: The Original Story. This edition of Gabrielle-Suzann Barbot de Villeneuse’s French narrative makes available to contemporary readers a highly readable yet scholarly version of one of the most popular eighteenth-century fairy tales. Wolfgang’s introductory material is top-notch: she skillfully traces the emergence of de Villeneuse’s composition within seventeenth and eighteenth-century century salon culture and details Villeneuse’s fascinatingly unconventional relationship with the talented but eccentric poet (and enemy of Voltaire) Prosper Jolyot Crebellion (1674-1762). Wolfgang’s introduction succinctly addresses questions of genre and literary value, discussing the fairy tale’s traditional association with women writers and its correspondingly poor literary reputation, while at the same time it provides a valuable overview of the genre’s thematic associations with marriage, female sexuality, masculinity, and violence. Wolfgang’s English translation is clear and accessible. The awards committee was perhaps most impressed by the edition’s pedagogical usefulness: both committee members have found occasion, since reading it, to recommend it to students. A lively, useful, and engaging edition of one of the best-known fairy tales, Beauty and the Beast: The Original Story is well-deserving of this award.
Graduate Student Conference Presentation Award:
Winner:
Jess Hamlet, “My wife is nothing”: Suppression of the Female in Pandosto and The Winter’s Tale,” presented at the Shakespeare Association of America in 2019.
The committee chose the paper of Jess Hamlet “My wife is nothing”: Suppression of the Female in Pandosto and The Winter’s Tale,” presented at the Shakespeare Association of America in 2019. Hamlet’s paper stood out for her careful exploration of how male authors contributed to ideas about gender and the presentation of proper women in the early modern period. Her paper justifies a need for feminist re-readings of classic and influential works not only to continue their relevance to contemporary audiences but to reveal new layers of the works and their context. Hamlet is careful to ground her comparison of Pandosto and The Winter’s Tale within the historical context and interplay of ideas about sexuality and familial dynamics. A dominant theme in her exploration is the expression of power over women’s bodies and how submission was linked to a powerful expression of women’s worth.
Honorable Mention:
Spirit Waite, “Woven by Hand, Worn on the Body: Textiles and the Formation of Florentine and Pratese Foundlings c. 1570-1650,” presented at the Monash University Post-Graduate Symposium in 2019.
The committee chose the paper of Spirit Waite, “Woven by Hand, Worn on the Body: Textiles and the Formation of Florentine and Pratese Foundlings c. 1570-1650” for Honorable Mention. This paper was presented at Monash University Post-Graduate Symposium in 2019 and is a strong example of material history for the study of women and gender. Waite explores the different uses of textiles to denote social class and worth of foundlings in early modern Italian society. She draws on a close reading of archival sources for purchases of clothes for foundlings, as well as the textile work they did, to argue that textiles were an essential factor in educating foundlings about their proper place in society and Catholic values of morality and piety. The textiles purchased then were essential in not just clothing the foundlings, but also in creating their identities in the unspoken language of cloth and dress.
Collaborative Project Award: (2 co-winners)
Co-Winner:
Women and Community in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia, ed. Michelle Armstrong-Partida, Alexandra Guerson, and Dana Wessell Lightfoot (Nebraska, 2020).
Women and Community in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia, edited by Michelle Armstrong-Partida, Alexandra Guerson, and Dana Wessell Lightfoot, interrogates the very idea of what constitutes community, and demonstrates that examining women’s roles and activities beyond the family changes our understanding of gender and social networks. Rather than treating community as self-evident or static, the contributors “explore the multi-varied and interwoven networks that women of different religious, socioeconomic, and geographic regions were embedded within.” While the deeply researched and well-written individual chapters address communities of Jewish women, conversas, Moriscas, nuns, and widows, the volume ranges beyond these groups to include women whose communities were not defined by religion or in relation to men: victims of clerical violence; perpetrators of neighborhood feuds; recipients of charitable support; and writers of wills. The volume amply fulfills its goal of “more clearly see[ing] women’s ability to navigate a multiplicity of identities and roles—and moves beyond the traditional approach of studying women within the confines of their families.” By treating community as a category of analysis, it reframes our understanding of the roles of women in medieval and early modern society.
Co-Winner:
Gender, Health and Healing 1250-1550, ed. Sarah Richey and Sharon Strocchia (Amsterdam, 2020).
Gender, Health and Healing 1250-1550, co-edited by Sara Richey and Sharon Strocchia, is exciting in conception and breadth, using “an integrative, hybrid model of analysis” that ranges far beyond “the narrow terrain of academic, text-based medicine” using new types of evidence about women’s “acts of caring and curing.” In eleven tightly argued and evidentially rich essays on engaging topics (including Ottoman healing baths, Caterina Sforza’s famous Ricettaria, and the care of the breast, among others) contributors manage to fulfill the promise of the Introduction: “to reimagine the lived experience of healthcare beyond the limited sphere of scholastic or theoretical medicine,” using non-traditional materials drawn from Christian and Islamic worlds to provide “a more nuanced picture of what people actually did to sustain or recover good health and the ways in which they understood their own bodies.”
Digital Scholarship, New Media, and Art:
Winner:
Art Herstory
(https://artherstory.net/about/)
The Art Herstory site celebrates the contributions of women artists of the early modern period. The painters recognized here were famed in their day, but have often been overlooked in modern histories and museums. Art Herstory is an active participant in recent efforts in the art world to right this wrong, as the site’s founder and creative director, Erika Gaffney, works with guest editors to provide news and blog posts about these female Old Masters. With its beautiful design, online shop (featuring elegant note cards), and social media presence, the site appeals not only to scholars, but also to a broader public interested in recapturing the import of these talented artists.
Honorable Mention:
Early Modern Female Book Ownership (https://earlymodernfemalebookownership.wordpress.com)
This blog is an exploration of the range of books owned by early modern women. Maintained by a team of scholars and librarians, the site features entries on everything from the content of women’s reading to the material culture of scripts and bindings. The blog is imminently readable: its posts are well tagged and—as promised by the site managers—“very short.” Entries are gorgeously illustrated, with images coming from a range of booksellers and libraries, as well as private collectors, thus making available books that would otherwise be viewable.