Structures and Subjectivities: Attending to Early Modern Women (review)

This is the fifth in a series of volumes that has emerged from the Attending to Early Modern Women symposia sponsored by the Center for Renaissance and Baroque Studies at the University of Maryland. The contents are a rich mix of plenary papers, keynote address, and reports from thirty-five workshops held at the November 2003 meeting.

The collection begins with Adele Seeff's brief but helpful "Director's Preface," which provides a useful background for those unfamiliar with the AEMW symposia and the books that have emerged from them. Joan E. Hartman's introduction is itself a notable contribution to the success of the entire volume. The book and conference title, she writes, "calls attention to what we can and probably cannot know about women in the early modern period. We study structures; we infer subjectivities, the lived experience of the women who inhabited them" (3).

Structures and Subjectivities is organized to reflect the unique, decentered shape of the conference. Part 1, entitled "Geographies and Polities," begins with three essays presented at the first plenary session of the conference, Adrian W. B. Randolph's "Renaissance Genderscapes," Alison Weber's "Locating Holiness in Early Modern Spain: Convents, Caves, and Houses," and Joanne M. Ferraro's "Representing Women in Early Modern Italian Economic History." The essays are followed by summaries of nine workshops that followed the opening session.

Part 2 of the collection is Craig A. Monson's "The Perilous, Enchanting Allure of Convent Singing," an exploration of post-Tridentine efforts to keep convent choirs "out of sight": "Catholic churchmen apparently perceived the necessity of keeping nun singers out of sight not only for the nuns' protection but also to protect weak-willed men prone to 'uncontrollable sensual experience' from the heady, perilously enchanting combination of nuns' voices and possible exposure to hidden nuns' glances" (113).

Part 3, "Degree, Priority, and Place," again begins with three essays, these from the second plenary session, Dorothy Ko's "Shoes and Fashion: The Cosmology of Female Desires in China," Susan S. Lanser's "The Political Economy of Same-Sex Desire," and Margaret Hunt's "Women in Ottoman and Western European Law Courts: Were Western Women Really the Luckiest Women in the World?" The essays are followed by summaries of ten subsequent workshops.

Part 4, "The Built Environment," provides three essays from the third plenary session, Elizabeth V. Chew's "Inhabiting the Great Man's House: Women and Space at Monticello," Carole Collier Frick's "Picture Perfect: Female Performance and Social Liminality in the Florentine Renaissance City," and Naomi J. Miller's "A Womb of One's Own: Constructing Maternal Space in Early Modern England and Beyond." Summaries of another eight workshops follow.

Finally, part 5 of the volume, "Pedagogies," provides the essays from the fourth plenary session, Julia Marciari Alexander's "The Early Modern Woman in the Twenty-First-Century Museum," Susanne Woods's "But Is It Any Good? The Value of Teaching Early Modern Writers," and Allyson M. Poska's "Managing Stress: Connecting Research and Pedagogy in Women's History," and eight workshop summaries.

I have listed the titles for all the complete essays in Structures and Subjectivities here, because the volume's title provides no clue to the richness and diversity of its contents. My review copy now sports an array of fluorescent Post-Its marking out topics for further reading, items related to my research projects, ideas for course materials, and teaching strategies. The workshops and their reading lists cover an array of topics, including female theatrical spaces, Quaker and Catholic women missionaries, the "debased, mutilated, and dead bodies" of women in religious images, women's letters, early modern women's medical and culinary recipe books, teaching, marriage, and churching ceremonies.

The first AEMW symposium attempted to draw equally from the disciplines of art history, history, and literature, but as Betty S. Travitsky noted in...