SSEMWG 2021 Book Award:

Book Award Winner

The work that wins this year’s Book Award is Ulrike Strasser’s Missionary Men in the Early Modern World: German Jesuits and Pacific Journeys. Strasser deftly explores the intersection of gender and global histories, using the Jesuits’ journeys from Europe into the Pacific. The German Jesuits seeking martyrdom across the globe brought their concepts of religion, sexuality, and gender into their interactions with indigenous cultures. While the study of men and Jesuits would seem to be nothing new, Strasser complicates our assumptions about the performance of gender in the patriarchal systems of early modern Europe. She argues that Jesuits crafted an alternative masculinity to that of laymen, combining aspects of the feminine and masculine. This new masculinity relied upon the exclusion of women and enforced ideas of proper femininity on the indigenous populations the Jesuits attempted to convert. Her work then highlights the complex interactions between the multiple embodiments of both male and female genders across European and global lines.

Book Award Co-Honorable Mention

Martha Moffitt-Peacock’s Heroines, Harpies, and Housewives: Imaging Women of Consequence in the Dutch Golden Age offers a convincing counter analysis to scholarship emphasizing the display of patriarchy in Dutch art produced in the seventeenth century. She employs the female archetypes of heroines, harpies, and housewives to emphasize the overlapping discourses that privileged women’s place and society and revealed anxieties about women’s influence. Through her exploration of images and texts, Moffitt-Peacock highlights the unique combination of factors that allowed women in the Netherlands to achieve and perpetuate greater social and cultural independence.

Book Award Co-Honorable Mention

John Christopoulos’s Abortion in Early Modern Italy is an extensive study of the medical, legal, and religious discourses on abortion and the lived experience of men and the women who had abortions. Despite current assumptions about Catholic Italy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as an anti-abortion society, Christopoulos convincingly argues that Italians were ambivalent about abortion, drawing nuanced but evolving distinctions between unacceptable and permissible abortions. Christopoulos alternates between chapters tracing abortion on a broad level and three microhistories providing an extended study of the men and women who had abortions during this period. This structure privileges the highly diverse and emotional nature of experiences and decisions that involved abortion.

SSEMWG Essay or Article Award:

Lara Dodds and Michelle M. Dowd, “Happy Accidents: Critical Belatedness, Feminist Formalism, and Early Modern Women’s Writing”

https://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/criticism/vol62/iss2/1/

Dowd’s and Dodds’ closely argued and path-breaking article is a call-to-arms. It decries the continued marginalization of work by scholars who study early modern women as well as the sidelining of women, as historical actors, authors, and artists within early modern studies more broadly. Their analysis of why this problem still exists in the field of English literature — despite the excellent and worthwhile efforts that have been made of the past few decades — offers sobering and instructive insights for humanist researchers of all disciplines, and it will be kindling for ardent and invigorating conversations throughout academia. Dowd and Dodds suggest a solution in the form of “feminist formalism,” an approach which considers early modern women’s engagements with form and thus places women’s writing in dialogue with larger cultural, literary, political, and religious movements. They demonstrate the value of such an approach in case studies of Elizabeth Cary’s Mariam (1613 and Hester Pulter’s (1605-­­­­­­78) poetry. Though their solution is not a perfect fit for every discipline, the authors make a compelling case for the urgency of recognizing what progress remains to be made and examining the trajectory of feminist inroads in each discipline in order to determine what obstacles have hampered our progress. We applaud the authors for their vision and for addressing a question of monumental importance for all scholars of the early modern period.

SSEMWG Editions Awards:

Josephine Roberts Award for a Scholarly Edition:

Rachel Adcock, Kate Aughterson, Claire Bowditch, Elaine Hobby, Alan James Hogarth, Anita Pacheco, and Margarete Rubik, The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Aphra Behn: Plays 1682-1696, vol. IV (Cambridge, 2021).

This magisterial work comprises five plays Aphra Behn wrote in the final years of her career as a writer. It follows the overarching goals of this eight-volume series (this is the first volume to be published), including locating Behn’s work in relation to the book trade, and positioning it within contemporary cultural, linguistic, and political contexts. While the plays, presented with their original spelling, are the centerpiece of the book, the scholarship that situates them makes this volume an essential handbook for scholars of British literature and theater, and early modern women and gender. The introductory essays to each play painstakingly situate it in its cultural, social, and political contexts, providing information and analysis on the context, subject matter, performance history, staging, and more. The editors also provide extensive footnotes that further situate and interpret the language of the text, and provide contemporary background information. This volume provides a welcome focus on the author as a woman and a writer in a specific historical context, and will be useful for both specialists and anyone interested in learning or teaching about women and gender in the early modern world.

Scholarly Edition in Translation Award:

Anne R. Larsen and Steve Maiullo, eds. and trans. Anna Marie van Schurman: Letters and Poems to and from Her Mentor and Other Members of Her Circle (Toronto, 2021).

Well-known in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as the most learned women in Europe, Anna Marie van Schurman’s writings are familiar to most scholars and students of early modern women and gender as an example of exceptional womanhood. Yet van Schurman’s work holds a minor position in the canon of European intellectual history because most of her writing was in letters, which scholars have often dismissed as private and with limited circulation, therefore of minor significance. This volume makes available in English, largely for the first time, much of van Schurman’s correspondence with the most illustrious minds in Europe, and shows how widely it was disseminated. Yet the editors do not allow this correspondence to stand alone: they extensively contextualize van Schurman’s life in the Netherlands, her experience as the first woman allowed to attend lectures at a Dutch university (although enclosed in a cubicle), religious life, and intellectual contributions, all with careful attention to women and gender. This close focus foregrounds both van Schurman’s experiences as a woman and her intellectual contributions to gender, women’s education, and religion. In doing so, it positions her as a major intellectual figure whose gender shaped her contributions and how she made them.

Honorable Mention for Scholarly Edition in Translation:

 Carinci, Eleonora. Ed.  Hannah Marcus, Trans.  Paula Findlen, Forward.  Letters on Natural 

Philosophy.  By Camilla Erculiani.  NY and Toronto:  Iter Press, 2021.

The scholars behind this volume bring to life the letters of the sixteenth-century Italian Camilla Erculiani, a pharmacist and active participant in the scientific community. This contribution is important for continuing to flesh out our understanding of the history of women’s writing, attending as it does to two understudied areas of study: literature of Counter-Reformation Italy, and texts by women scientists. The project is also a model of collaborative scholarly work, with an illuminating foreword by Findlen; an erudite introduction by Carinci; and an imminently readable translation of the complex source texts by Marcus.

Teaching Edition Award

 Few, Martha, Zeb Tortorici, and Adam Warren.  Baptism Through Incision:  The Postmortem  

            Caesarean Operation in the Spanish Empire.  University Park:  Pennsylvania State

University Press, 2020.

A fascinating text with which to reflect on the intersection of gender, medicine, and religion in the early modern world, this volume discusses the curious practice of performing caesareans on recently deceased pregnant women in order to baptize the fetuses they carried. The main translation, by Nina M. Scott, is the 1786 treatise on the subject by the Guatemalan priest Pedro José de Arrese, accompanied by a critical introduction and excerpts from relevant contemporary sources. Few, Tortorici, and Warren combine to make a concise volume that is useful for Latin American scholars; accessible for students; and engrossing for anyone interested in approaches to women’s bodies in this period.

SSEMWG Graduate Student Conference Presentation Award: 

Winner:

Beth Bourn Williams’s paper on “Performing Domesticity at the Protectoral Court of Oliver Cromwell, 1653-1658” reassesses the relationship between the family and the state in English republican ideology. Many historians have tended to credit the self-description of seventeenth-century republicans at face value and thereby to assume that they endeavored to change the personal and feminized politics of Charles I’s court by segregating the personal (defined as women, the domestic, the affective) from the political (defined as men, the state, the rational).  Bourn Williams reveals a far more complicated reality. Although “the protectorate projected an image of politics that was masculine, formal and depersonalised,” this distinction was itself orchestrated at the highest levels of government through spacial and ceremonial representations. In fact, far from being excluded from political events and decisions, Cromwell’s wife and daughters were central to protectorate statecraft insofar as their ostensible withdrawal from public life performed a republican ideal for English audiences even as their prominent role in diplomatic events perpetuated the notion of personal access to the sovereign. Lucidly written and full of compelling historical detail, Bourn Williams’s paper establishes not only the performative dimension of Cromwellian claims to establish “collective politics founded on impersonal institutions and serving public interest” but also the involvement of both the protectoral government and contemporary scholars in perpetuating that masculine ideal—against significant historical evidence to the contrary. Bourn Williams’s essay has far-reaching implications, reminding us that gender is not just a useful category of historical analysis but an indispensible one with the potential to puncture illusions of politics—and scholarship—free from women and private world they represent.

Honorable Mention:

Alexandra Wingate’s “No entiende el Balor de los libros”: The value of books for women owners in 17th-century Navarre” argues that 17th-century Navarrese women forged socio-political legitimacy and autonomy from their ability to own, trade, print, and inherit books. Female self-determination in Spain was borne in part out of the agency and communicative fluency required to curate book collections– or, even, to enter a bookstore without a man. Conversely, the “pobre mujer” was unable to read, own, or participate in the conversation about the intellectual and cultural worth of books, and consequently was less socially efficacious than her book-owning peers. The result is that judgments about the value of women in 17th-century Spain were directly tied to the social currency of book ownership.

SSEMWG Collaborative Project Award:

Wiesner-Hanks, Merry E.  Ed.  Challenging Women’s Agency and Activism in Early Modernity.  Amsterdam:  Amsterdam University Press, 2021.

Challenging Women’s Agency and Activism in Early Modernity offers fresh approaches to a well-worn, yet ever-important topic. Organized around verbs in order to access action – choosing, creating, confronting, challenging — the chapters cover a broad range of ways that early modern women created agency and that early modern society contested it. Together the chapters admirably connect women’s agency (or challenges to it) to seemingly unrelated aspects of early modern life, such as the history of intoxication, portraiture, and travel writing in East Asia. Its authors also model how newer analytical approaches, such as the material turn and the history of emotions, can animate the venerable theme of women’s agency. The book is groundbreaking not only for its insights into action and agency, but also for its trans-disciplinary perspective. Contributors span Art History, English, History, Italian Studies, and Women and Gender Studies. Resulting chapters are succinct and clear without sacrificing academic rigor, making them perfect for the classroom. There is also a much-welcomed chapter on the pedagogical implications of the history of action and agency. The result is an engaging volume that more than fulfills its editor’s promise to “historicize agency, to use it as a starting point rather than a conclusion.”

SSEMWG Digital Scholarship Award:

Not awarded in 2021

SSEMWG Award for Best Article in 

Early Modern Women:  An Interdisciplinary Journal, Volume 15

In “Sweet Chains and Happy Prisons: Collective Rituals of Pregnancy and Childbirth in Seventeenth-Century Spanish Occasional Poetry and Domestic Remedy Manuals,”  Emily Kuffner provides valuable new knowledge about the culture around childbirth in early modern Spain. Focusing on occasional poems by Ramírez de Guzmán and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Kuffner traces the network of poetry, gifts, recipe books, and midwifery manuals that shaped early modern obstetrics. Kuffman demonstrates how women’s knowledge of academic medicine informed pre- and post-natal care, bringing together the science of obstetrics with emotional support, domestic expertise, and religious devotion to ensure the health and survival of both mother and infant against horrifying odds. Kuffner masterfully illuminates how Sor Juana and Ramírez marshall the baroque fascination with excess and the grotesque to situate themselves as comadres, or co-mothers sharing the burden of the extraordinary and unpredictable process of parturition. She persuasively and elegantly reveals the centrality of women’s knowledge and communities in early modern medicine.