May 2018 – Uncomfortable Alliances, Embarrassing Relations: Resisting and Reclaiming Intersectionality

Christina Luckyj for the SSEMW Blog Coalitions, especially intersectional ones, can make for strange bedfellows. Many of us who advocate for early modern women writers might well avert our eyes if those women appeared on our street corners to hawk their religious pamphlets - just as they in turn might cast a censorious glance in our direction as we scurried past. “For various reasons, I sometimes feel uncomfortable about all this work on early modern religious texts,” tweeted Helen Smith on April 5 2018, citing her “lifelong atheism” as one reason for her discomfort. “The #nuntastic hashtag, great though it…
Read More

November 2016 – Bernardino Ochino and the Women Who Made His Career Possible

Julie D. Campbell for the SSEMW Blog In January 2106, I attended a webinar entitled “Networking Early Modern Women,” intended to help scholars add early modern English women’s names to the Six Degrees of Francis Bacon project, a DH endeavor produced by a partnership between Carnegie Mellon University and Georgetown University. The Bacon project, co-founded by Christopher Warren and Daniel Shore, “aims to be the broadest, most accessible source of who knew whom in early modern Britain.” Warren says that Six Degrees shows two degrees of relationship—“Think friends and friends of friends.”[1] It occurred to me that if one mapped…
Read More

September 2016 – Transnationalism and the Study of Early Modern Women

Allyson M. Poska for the SSEMW Blog Transnational scholarship is all the rage, but luckily for us, study of early modern women and transnationalism are natural partners. In fact, in many ways, early modern women’s scholarship was at the forefront of this scholarly trend. Long before intellectuals employed the term, many of the most prominent scholars in our field were intuitively led towards what has become known as transnational scholarship. By looking across borders, they hoped to move beyond the biographical focus on exceptional women and find like-minded and similarly situated women with whom they could make comparisons and reveal connections.…
Read More