Early Modern Women and Transnational Communities of Letters (review)

This collection of eleven essays, with a foreword, afterword, and substantial introduction presents early modern women's writing from England, Scotland, France, Italy, and the Netherlands, from the early sixteenth to late seventeenth centuries. These essays represent a recent shift in literary historical studies of women's writing from a focus on the social and intellectual constraints experienced by female authors to the ways in which their writing was sustained and promoted by pan-European intellectual communities of men and women. The editors identify several historical elements which supported women's writing in this period: women's education within the 'learned family' and with this the cultural capital associated with educated women; salons and academies; the publication of anthologies of women's writing; and religious-political provocations as a catalyst for writing.

Diana Robin's foreword presents the key features of the literary culture of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries which benefitted writers, and to which they contributed: the rediscovered classical heritage; the movement of books made possible by the new technology of print; and vernacular translations of canonical and new works. In her afterword, Margaret Ezell emphasizes the role of interdisciplinary scholarly networks working on women's writing in continuing to question and broaden the historical assumptions of early modern women's lives that inform critical approaches to their writing. For example, many essays in this collection show the mobility of women and their texts across social, national, and linguistic borders, where earlier criticism may have taken for granted women's place within the home as emphasized in didactic literature of the period.

The body of the text is divided into three sections. Part I is entitled 'Continental Epistolary Communities', and contains three essays. Susan Broomhall writes on the Nassau family correspondence at the turn of the seventeenth century, with a focus on 'how gender inflected their epistolary negotiation of relationships and discourse with their correspondents' (p. 25). For the women especially, an important role of letters was the formation and maintenance of ideas of family identity across wide distances and political and religious divisions in the family. Meredith Ray finds in Arcangela Tarabotti's (1604-52) published letter collection evidence of her engagement with secular society and commerce contrary to the efforts of church authorities to enforce the enclosure of nuns. Tarabotti records her role as an intermediary in lace production, and her participation in the education of girls boarding at the convent and in marriage negotiations on behalf of young women who had completed their education. In her essay, Camilla Russell shows that the personal correspondence between Giulia Gonzaga (1513-66) and Pietro Carnasecchi (1508-67) was one of the means by which the network of the Spirituali was maintained after their beliefs were declared heretical in 1645. Gonzaga's gender and social status protected her from prosecution by the Inquisition, leaving her free to continue her religious leadership, but in 1566, the year after Gonzaga's death, Carnasecchi was convicted and executed for heresy on the basis of the letters' contents.

The theme of the five essays in Part II is 'Cross-channel textual communities and uses of print'. Leah Chang presents Parisian printer Jean de Marnef's publication of a female-authored poetry anthology as a 'gendered publication' in which gender is central 'for understanding the presentation and even the material production of the book' (p. 99). Chang argues that in this volume the female printer combines previously published poetry by Pernette du Guillet with ten anonymous poems to present a particularly female conception of desire, virtue, and amité (understood as mutual respect between spouses). Sharon Arnhoult demonstrates that the prayers of Dorothy, Lady Pakington (1623-79), which circulated in manuscript and were used in household and family prayer, were a legitimate means of political and religious expression and influence in support of the Royalist cause. Susan Felch explores...