Challenging Orthodoxies: The Social and Cultural Worlds of Early Modern Women. Essays Presented to Hilda L. Smith ed. by Sigrun Haude and Melinda S. Zook (review)

The ten essays in this volume are dedicated to women’s history scholar Hilda L. Smith. The essays reflect Smith’s dedication to ‘challenging orthodoxies’, and each essay intends to confront ‘some perceived wisdom, “truth” or orthodoxy’, by exploring ways in which women challenged conventional thinking and acted in ways that were previously unknown (p. 5). All of these essays make for fascinating reading and provide fuel for future research. For the sake of brevity, I will discuss the best contributions from each section of the book.

Part I, ‘Challenging Cultural and Social Traditions’, opens with Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks’s essay challenging ideas about womanhood, the boundaries between wild and civilised, animal and human, woman and monster. The essay focuses on two ‘hairy girls’, the Gonzales sisters, who had a condition called hypertrichosis universalis that caused most of their bodies to be covered in hair. Wiesner-Hanks questions whether contemporaries considered the sisters to be women or even human. By evaluating physical, linguistic, and religious constructs of what ‘made’ a woman, she comes to the conclusion that all women were considered to be monsters to some extent, or at least, more animal than human.

Part II, ‘Challenging Scientific and Intellectual Traditions’, also opens with its strongest essay, wherein Lisa T. Sarasohn examines the multiple meanings of bodily parasites, specifically fleas and lice in fiction, satire, and political commentary. According to Sarasohn, parasites were particularly associated with sexual promiscuity, voyeurism, and even political rebellion and she shows how fleas and lice came to represent more than uncleanliness as they attached themselves to kings and beggars alike.

Part III, ‘Challenging Legal and Political Traditions’, is best represented by Anna Suranyi’s chapter on early modern women and indentured servitude. Suranyi focuses on how female indentured servants attempted to negotiate some aspects of their servitude. These women made and broke their own contracts, sometimes after being kidnapped or pressed into servitude. In one fascinating case, the female leader of a criminal gang had her contract of servitude bought off by her criminal associates. Suranyi’s essay finds women in surprising places successfully petitioning against sentences of transportation, taking their abusive masters to court, and even escaping transportation altogether.

All ten chapters of this exceptional volume succeed in challenging our ideas about early modern women. Many of these essays offer a demonstration on how to find early modern women acting in unexpected or unexplored ways. The authors of these essays show them making financial investments, becoming master gun-makers, engaging in legal discourse, and wielding pistols. Scholarship on early modern women is enriched by this work.