The Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, Toronto, Canada, is pleased to announce the publication of the 31st volume in The Essays & Studies series:
“Creating Women: Representation, Self-Representation, and Agency in the Renaissance”, edited by Manuela Scarci.
This interdisciplinary and diverse collection of articles stems from a conference that centred on the idea of creating women. The verbal adjective in the title was meant to signal a dual meaning: women create and women are created by others. What did they create? What was their sense of themselves? How were their identities created in the early modern era? The purpose of the articles gathered here is to explore the fashioning of feminine identity, the social and psychological construct of woman in the early modern age, both from their own perspective and that of others. As in the case of most collaborative projects of this nature, the volume is eclectic and spans, across several centuries, the boundaries of disciplines and theoretical approaches, but the essays are bound together by their common search to define paradigms of femininity in the early modern period.
“This is an excellent collection of essays. As the subtle double meaning of the adjective ‘creating’ in the title of this volume suggests, these essays explore the multiple ways in which women, whether in royal palaces, convents, patrician mansions, or bourgeois households, shaped and altered the values and discourses of their surroundings.”
– Giuseppe Mazzotta, Yale University
“The eleven articles in this volume point to women self-fashioning their identity within the social, cultural, religious, and legal constraints of the country and the century in which they lived. I have nothing but praise for the quality of this work. It will fill a void in numerous studies on the status of women.”
– Régine Reynolds-Cornell, Agnes Scott College
Contents:
– “In Joan of Arc’s Shadow: The Maid of Orleans as Identificatory Model in Some Seventeenth-Century Polemical Texts”, Jean-Philippe Beaulieu
– “Women’s Voices in the Works of Suzanne de Nervèze”, Diane Desrosiers
– “Speaking of Women and Giving Voice to Women: The Example of Madeleine and Georges de Scudéry’s Femmes illustres ou les harangues héroïques“, Renée Claude Breitenstein
– “Models for Women in the Letters of Huguenot Noblewomen 1560-1620″, Jane Couchman
– “Early Modern Englishwomen’s Miserere: Ambitious and Penitent Expression”, Patricia Demers
– “Female Impressions: Some Women Writers in Seventeenth-Century English Print”, Anne Lake Prescott
– “Honour and Shame: The Construction of Married Women’s Bodies in Fifteenth-Century Spanish Law”, Dana Wessell Lightfoot
– “From a Manly Knowledge to a Man’s Helpmeet: Changing Conceptions of Midwives’ Roles in Seventeenth-Century France”, Bridgette Ann Sheridan
– “The Many Faces of Female Discipline: Gender Control, Subversion, and the Nun-Confessor Relationship in Golden Age Barcelona”, Cristian Berco
– “The Role of Women in Their Kin’s Economic and Political Life: The Sienese Case (End XIV-Mid XV Century)”, Elena Brizio
– “The Role of Queen Maria Amalia of Saxony in the Planning of the Royal Palace of Caserta”, Francesco Divenuto
205 pp / Softcover / October 2013 / ISBN 978-0-7727-2146-4 / $21.50 (Outside Canada, please pay in US$)
For more information, please visit http://crrs.ca/publications/es31 or email crrs.publications@utoronto.ca