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  • Introduction

In this issue, we revisit an important work for feminist scholarship on early modern women, as we did in volume 8, whose forum focused on Joan Kelly’s “Did Women Have a Renaissance?” The forum in this issue considers the topic of entrepreneurial women, honoring Alice Clark’s Working Life of Women in the Seventeenth Century — first published in 1919 and reprinted many times since. As Hilda Smith’s introductory essay on Clark’s legacy demonstrates, the book has been foundational for the economic history of early modern English women, including Smith’s own research, which reveals the centrality of women in trades not normally associated with them. Cynthia Stollhans reexamines Vannozza Cattanei, most known for her roles as mistress of Pope Alexander VI and mother of Cesare and Lucrezia Borgia, showing her also to have been a shrewd and successful proprietor and hotelière. Carmen Sanz Ayán discusses Spanish women who distinguished themselves as theater managers, not simply because many had previously been actresses, but because they proved to be excellent administrators of commercial companies. Jeanette Fregulia’s contribution reveals that middling women who were business owners and investors in seventeenth-century Milan played an integral role in helping the city weather an economic crisis.

Janine Lanza demonstrates how opportunities abounded for women in the purveying of food and directing shops within craft guilds in early modern France. Focusing on the case of Mary Beale, a painter who managed a successful business with the crucial assistance of her husband, Helen Draper calls attention to the many unrecognized women painters of seventeenth-century London. The cover of this issue features Beale’s confident self-portrait on display at the National Portrait Gallery, London, in which she depicts herself holding an oil sketch of her two sons and wearing silk taffeta, a mark of her financial success as a painter. The paradigm of the Atlantic world enables Kim Todt to uncover the experiences of Dutch and French femmes d’affaires as well as African and Native [End Page 1] American women in the colonies of the New World and to expand the definition of what constitutes “business” in these environments. Philip Havik surveys the little-known, yet fascinating, history of women merchants on the West African coast, who relied on their considerable skills, kinship relations, and contact with Europeans.

The first article of this issue further explores this topic. As Amy Froide’s “Educating the Early Modern Businesswoman” demonstrates, women from a range of social ranks were expected to acquire numeracy that enabled them to exploit new investment opportunities during Britain’s Financial Revolution. Megan J. Fung addresses the relationship among “Art, Authority, and Domesticity” in Margaret Cavendish’s poetry, despite her apparent repudiation of what were commonly considered womanly activities. Finally, Stephanie Pietros’s “Anne Bradstreet’s ‘dear remains’” examines the various representations of parent–child relationships in her poetry to argue that Bradstreet fashions her poetic identity and legacy through that trope. Finally, in “Elizabeth Delaval’s Memoirs and Meditations,” Susan Wiseman recontextualizes this text, which has been read as a courtship romance, by calling attention to the importance of the period in which the author constructed it, during the Jacobite troubles.

As always, we are indebted to our authors, reviewers, and referees for the scholarship and expertise that enable EMWJ to continue to bring rich and stimulating collections of articles and reviews to its readers. [End Page 2]

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