The Ashgate Research Companion to Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe ed. by Allyson M. Poska, Jane Couchman, and Katherine A. McIver (review)

This volume surveys current knowledge, critical approaches, and historiographical developments over the past four decades of historical research on women and gender in early Modern Europe. It contains twenty-four essays arranged around the broad themes of Religion, Embodied Lives, and Cultural Production. Each essay provides a synthesis of, and critical reflection upon, current knowledge in the author’s field of expertise and suggestions for future research. This format creates a rich and lively panorama of past and current research, and the density of the essays makes each reference list a resource in itself. Fulfilling its role as a research companion, it is essential reading at the literature review stage for graduate students of European history or literature, or for scholars seeking an overview of particular themes across national borders. Individual essays would be an ideal springboard and guide for undergraduate students planning a research essay.

The essay subjects reflect the development of women’s history over the last forty years, covering established areas such as women writers (both lay and religious), religious life (Catholic and Protestant), and areas that have flourished in the last twenty years, such as work on women as patrons, artists, and musicians. More recent areas of research are also represented, such as material culture, sexuality, aging, and maternity. I will briefly consider essays from each of the three sections of the book, and reflect on the ways in which ‘thinking with women’ in each field of study has immeasurably enriched both early modern scholarship and understandings of the past, not only women’s history.

Elizabeth Lehfeldt writes that the scholarship on female monastic institutions across Western Europe and the Americas from 1400 to 1800 has transformed our understanding of social, political, and religious change in this period. Those studies that were part of the re-examination of the Catholic and Counter-Reformation provided insights into how convents negotiated theological and doctrinal shifts in the Church, or confessional changes in their cities. Other studies emphasised the ways in which female religious institutions were sites of power, integral to the social and political fabric of communities. Wealthy families could dominate administration of convents, and share control of institutions for generations. Lay patronage of convents linked spiritual and cultural capital with conspicuous display in the theatre of political power. Some convents had an economic role in cities, as landholders, investors, and in some cases as capital lenders and producers of goods.

A thematic approach is taken by Elizabeth S. Cohen, whose essay surveys studies that have focused on processes of marginalisation and gendered identities. The strength of research in this area has been to reveal the rich complexity of lived experience, as women negotiated normative boundaries, and multiple sources of marginality, defined as restricted access to bodily, social, cultural, political, and legal assets.

Julie Campbell’s essay on the Querelle des femmes considers a philosophical and literary subject that occupied both male and female authors from the late Middle Ages. Campbell discusses modern editions of the main texts, and critical approaches to the material, while tracing the shift in scholarship from a focus on individual texts within the debate, to the ways in which the Querelle can ‘function as a barometer of social and cultural tensions in given historical contexts’ (p. 362).

Finally, in the last essay in the volume, Linda Phyllis Austern considers interdisciplinary research in the field of gender and music. The presence of music at all levels of cultural, social, and political life combined with the necessarily embodied nature of the acquisition of musical skills, musical performance, and the frequently gendered contexts of performance provide a rich matrix for generating new understandings of the gendered dimensions of intellectual, social, and political life. Scholarship on gender and music has introduced secular and religious female...