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Reviewed by:
  • Creating Women: Representation, Self-Representation, Agency in the Renaissance ed. by Manuela Scarci
  • Susan Broomhall
Scarci, Manuela, ed., Creating Women: Representation, Self-Representation, Agency in the Renaissance (Essays & Studies), Toronto, Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2013; paperback, pp. 205; R.R.P. US$21.50; ISBN 9780772721464.

This volume aims to explore both the creative agency of early modern women and how they were ‘created’ by others. However, meanings of representation, agency, and creativity are not explicitly articulated in the Introduction, and the authors do not appear to pursue shared concepts or questions. The result is a set of essays that includes examinations of women writers, texts about women, married women’s legal position, women’s patronage of creative projects, their management of finances, and what might be termed one woman’s ‘creative’ sexual behaviour.

The first section takes us to the political culture of early seventeenth-century France into which a series of women intervened through fiction. Essays by literary scholars Jean-Philippe Beaulieu, Diane Desrosiers, and Renée-Claude Breitenstein highlight both the individual and shared strategies of authors Suzanne de Nervese, Charlotte de Henault, and Madeleine and Georges de Scudéry, for participation in contemporary political discourse.

The second section continues to study women and their writing, but through quite different texts and with more disparate questions in view. [End Page 211] Jane Couchman examines letters of Huguenot noblewomen to show how motherhood emerged as powerful role in the second generation. Patricia Demers studies both highly individual and gendered responses to Psalm 51 in misereres by Anne Vaughan Lock, Mary Sidney Herbert, and Elizabeth I in her translation of Marguerite de Navarre’s Miroir. Anne Lake Prescott considers women’s presentation as writers in their printed texts, tracing changing contextualisation of Marguerite de Valois’s memoirs across the political regimes of seventeenth-century England, always framing her significance in relation to leading men.

A third section explores women and their bodies, examining the conceptualisation of women’s bodies as part of their husband’s honour in fifteenth-century legal texts from Valencia (Dana Wessell Lightfoot), and changing perceptions of women’s contributions to midwifery in accounts by practitioners Louise Bourgeois and Marguerite du Tertre de la Marche, during a period in which men gained increasing control of obstetrics (Bridgette Ann Sheridan). Cristian Berco investigates penitential practices in the Counter-Reformation Church, highlighting distinctive attempts to regulate female and male desire for spiritual discipline.

The final section, on women and their agency, sees Elena Brizio argue that thirteenth- to fifteenth-century Sienese notarial records show women protecting daughters and grand-daughters in innovative ways through their wills to bypass the strictures of statutes. Francesco Divenuto explores the architectural and aesthetic negotiations of Charles de Bourbon and Maria Amalia of Saxony through letters directing renovations to their palace at Caserta. Divenuto shows how Maria Amalia was responsible for bringing baroque innovations to Naples, favouring the fashion for Chinoiserie and new industries such as silk farming and porcelain manufacture.

Essays thus span the thirteenth to the eighteenth centuries (a long ‘Renaissance’ indeed), examine French, Spanish, Italian, and English examples, and consider agency in myriad ways, through different source types, and as it affects women of different social levels. Scarci concludes her Introduction with welcome, if not novel, encouragement to turn more closely to sources created by women themselves, but does not address such questions as how these might be defined, issues of mediation negotiated, or our current concepts of agency and representation expanded. Creative agency, what it can mean for women, and where we look to analyse it in their experiences, is a topic of much current interest to scholars but the essays here contribute to its understanding more as individual pieces than the volume perhaps does as a whole. [End Page 212]

Susan Broomhall
The University of Western Australia
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