This volume is the fifth in the series Attending to Early Modern Women, all of which proceed from the symposia by the same name, sponsored by the Center for Renaissance and Baroque Studies at the University of Maryland. The articles presented here stem from the November 2003 meeting, and the interdisciplinary nature of that symposium is clearly visible in the texts: the authors, representing various fields, deal with topics ranging from law, economics, and architecture to shoes, convent singing, and portrait painting.
The five parts of the book each include several articles and workshop summaries from the symposium. In part 1, “Geographies and Polities,” Adrian Randolph, Alison Weber, and Joan Ferrara all argue for a revised view of early modern women's ability to negotiate gender roles. Randolph discusses the performative role of gender in Italian Renaissance paintings, where female subjects, even though enclosed in interior spaces, also interacted with the more masculine exterior world. Weber finds that religious women in early modern Spain operated in a viable and vibrant economy of secular goods and holy services despite the new strictures of post-Tridentine clausura. Ferrara, focusing on early modern Italy, argues that women's crucial contributions to the economy have been hidden from historians’ view because women generally worked in their own homes, even when they produced goods for the market.
The second part consists of Craig Monson's keynote address, which interprets the meanings of singing nuns. Monson finds that nuns were sometimes instrumental in arranging and composing their musical performances and determining the setting in which they sang (usually in areas of the churches physically separated from the lay congregation). Furthermore, by presenting their singing as angelic and thus a reflection of the divine, the nuns tried to calm male anxieties about the alluring beauty of female voices, made even more enticing by the singers' being partly or fully hidden from view behind the screens and grilles of the convent churches.
Part 3 is somewhat mysteriously entitled “Degree, Priority, and Place,” which seems to be as vague as the connection between the articles themselves. Dorothy Ko focuses on the Chinese practice of foot-binding and argues that it was not just simply an expression of the oppressive male patriarchy, but that women were instrumental in shaping their feet and in the production of the footwear that displayed them, using these means to negotiate their own positions and to reflect their own power. Susan Lanser reads seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Western European texts and finds that the greater visibility of same-sex desires in these texts resulted from a wish to create a cultural and social space that allowed for greater political and personal development for women in a patriarchal society, rather than simply reflecting a growing number and openness of lesbian women. Margaret Hunt compares laws regarding women in the Ottoman Empire with those of Western Europe during the early modern period and finds that Ottoman Muslim women in fact had more rights and greater freedoms than did their Western sisters.
Part 4 is entitled “The Built Environment” and focuses on human-created spaces of various sorts. Elizabeth Chew looks at the architecture of Monticello, Thomas Jefferson's great Virginia estate. Chew points to the ways that women in Jefferson's family used and claimed the space in the house that originally had been created to accommodate the specific needs of Jefferson himself. Carole Frick looks at the performance of the feminine in Renaissance Florentine portraits, at the way wealthy families used young unmarried women as markers of social and economic status through the display of their elaborate and expensive costumes. Maternal space forms the topic of Naomi Miller's article. Reading Shakespeare's The Tempest, Miller points to the curious powers of the mother figure, although she is physically absent in the play.
The authors of the articles in the fifth and last part of the book discuss various strategies for teaching the history of early modern women. Julia Alexander points to the usefulness of museums as forums for historians and the general public, and Susanne Woods addresses the issue of the literary worth of early modern female writers. Finally, Allyson Poska focuses on academic stress management, specifically on stress caused by the process of the defeminization of her institution, Mary Washington College, formerly a college for women. In order to attract more male students, the college administration decided that overt vestiges of the female past should be removed.
This volume presents a varied and multivoiced state of the field of early modern gender history, and generally the diagnosis is very good. Its wide geographic scope, including essays on women in China and the United States is a welcome globalization of a previously Europe-dominated field. Moreover, Margaret Hunt's call for more focused study and inclusion of Ottoman Muslim women in the general study of European women is a necessary reminder of a need to broaden the term “European” to include non-Christian Europe as well.
Most of the essays are easily accessible for interested readers in any field, but some examples of language that is so field specific as to make it almost impenetrable for nonexperts exist, for example, the articles by Randolph, Lanser, and Miller. It is unfortunate, because it hampers the interdisciplinary discourse that the editors state they want to foster. As Alexander so aptly points out in her essay, “clarity of language” should not be confused with “the 'dumbing down' of content” (323). Furthermore, I ama bit ambivalent regarding the value of including the workshop summaries. While the summaries inform the reader about the discussions focused on the readings for each of the workshops and could certainly be used as a platform for future research agendas, they fail to present many qualitative conclusions and usually end with rather vague statements about the difficulty of defining historical concepts (a problem with which most historians are already acutely familiar). Overall, however, this volume is a great testament to the vibrancy and growth of the fascinating study of early modern women.
