November 2019 – “I leave the Reader to judge and compare ’em”: Computational Explorations of Aphra Behn’s Dramatic Dubia

Mel Evans for the SSEMWG Blog Aphra Behn and her literary works, as is often the case with pioneers, have been subject to extensive criticism and derogation. Accusations of plagiarism, salacious and bawdy content, and poor literary merit were directed at her theatrical, prose and poetic works throughout her lifetime, and subsequent criticism and popular opinion has often adopted a similar stance. More recently, Behn’s achievements have, of course, been increasingly recognised and celebrated as part of the endeavour to rehabilitate and reposition women’s writings in Anglophone literature; Virginia Woolf’s famous eulogy to Behn, as the woman to whom all…
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Book Announcement: Margaret L. King’s Enlightenment Thought

Enlightenment Thought: An Anthology of Sources Edited and Translated, with an Introduction, by Margaret L. King 304 pp. "Margaret L. King has put together a highly representative selection of readings from most of the more significant—but by no means the most obvious—texts by the authors who made up the movement we have come to call the 'Enlightenment.' They range across much of Europe and the Americas, and from the early seventeenth century until the end of the eighteenth. In the originality of the choice of texts, in its range and depth, this collection offers both wide coverage and striking insights…
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Invitation for ESSAY PROPOSALS

AUTHORIZING EARLY MODERN WOMEN: FROM BIOGRAPHY TO BIOFICTION is a new volume of essays that aims to chart intersections among history, biography, and the growing field of biofiction, or contemporary fictionalizations of historical figures, in this case of early modern women. Edited by James Fitzmaurice, Naomi J. Miller, and Sara Jayne Steen, the volume will include essays on women artists, conceived broadly, across examples of painting, poetry, playwriting, prose, and tapestry. We’re particularly interested in essays that consider recent biographies and/or fictionalizations (novels, stage plays, films) about such early modern women as Sofonisba Anguissola and Artemisia Gentileschi, Judith Leyster and…
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Queen Mary I edited collection

Images of Queen Mary I in Literature and Writing Edited by Valerie Schutte I am seeking essay proposals for an edited volume focused on writings and literature about Queen Mary I. A few essays and book chapters exist on this subject, but there is no one volume that considers how Mary was written about in documents and letters as well as used in literature, from poetry to plays. While comparisons with her younger sister, Elizabeth, often yield fruitful results, this volume prefers essays focused solely on Mary so as to recover her from the shadows of Elizabeth and her reign.…
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April 2019 – Axes of Uncertainty and Recovering Women’s Voices in Early Modern Miscellanies.

Eric McCarthy for the SSEMWG Blog  I am delighted to contribute a blog post on the theme of “Power, Authority, and Women's Voices in Early Modern Texts, Criticism, and the Academy Today,” not least because it relates to the work I’ve been doing for the ERC-funded project "RECIRC: The Reception and Circulation of Early Modern Women’s Writing, 1550–1700" over the last few years. I began with what seemed like a straightforward question: which female-authored works were transcribed most often in manuscript miscellanies? It was easy enough to produce a ranked list of the works in the miscellanies we had consulted,…
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Book Announcement, Women on the Edge in Early Modern Europe

Title: Women on the Edge in Early Modern Europe Volume Editors: Lisa Hopkins & Aidan Norrie Series: Gendering the Late Medieval & Early Modern World Publisher: Amsterdam University Press Women on the Edge in Early Modern Europe examines the lives of women whose gender impeded the exercise of their personal, political, and religious agency, with an emphasis on the conflict that occurred when they crossed the edges society placed on their gender. Many of the women featured in this collection have only been afforded cursory scholarly focus, or the focus has been isolated to a specific, (in)famous event. This collection…
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Dancing Queen: Marie de Médicis’ Ballets at the Court of Henri IV

Dancing Queen: Marie de Médicis' Ballets at the Court of Henri IV (Toronto, Buffalo, London: University of Toronto Press, 2019). Drawing on newly discovered primary sources as well as theories and methodologies derived from literary studies, political history, musicology, dance studies, and women’s and gender studies, Dancing Queen traces how Queen Marie de Médicis’ ballets authorized her incipient political authority through innovative verbal and visual imagery, avant-garde musical developments, and ceremonial arrangements of objects and bodies in space. Making use of women’s “semi-official” status as political agents, Marie’s ballets also manipulated the subtle social and cultural codes of international courtly…
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CFPanelests: Gender, Emotion, Colonialism

Call for panelists interested in submitting a panel proposal to the 2020 Big Berks on the topic of gender, emotion, and colonialism in the early Atlantic World. See the Berks CFP for more information: https://berksconference.org/big-berks/2020-berkshire-conference/ My paper concerns representations of a 16th C French “Chambermaid,” who participated in a French Huguenot attempt to colonize Florida in the 1650s, in the context of colonial representations of Indigenous female masculinity and colonial sexual violence in 16th C Protestant travel narratives. I will engage with the humoral science of The Passions as one environment in which gendered identity is challenged and produced during…
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Book Announcement, Fictions of Containment in the Spanish Female Picaresque

Fictions of Containment in the Spanish Female Picaresque Architectural Space and Prostitution in the Early Modern Mediterranean by Emily Kuffner Publisher: Amsterdam University Press Series: Gendering the Late Medieval & Early Modern World This study examines the interdependence of gender, sexuality and space in the early modern period, which saw the inception of architecture as a discipline and gave rise to the first custodial institutions for women, including convents for reformed prostitutes. Meanwhile, conduct manuals established prescriptive mandates for female use of space, concentrating especially on the liminal spaces of the home. This work traces literary prostitution in the Spanish…
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