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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November 2018 – ‘She said’: women’s authority, #MeToo and Margaret Cavendish

Joanne Wright for the SSEMW Blog In 1989, students and staff at Columbia University hung a 170-foot wide banner off the top of Butler Library featuring the names of women writers, from Sappho and Christine de Pizan to Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz and Virginia Woolf. As Laura Brown, who designed and made the banner, pointed out, “Great women do not get their names inscribed on buildings.”[1]  To this end, the Columbia University Banner Project provided a symbolic counterweight to the list of iconic Western men that permanently adorn the building in stone. Later, in 1994, when designing another banner…
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