Attending to Early Modern Women: Conflict and Concord ed. by Karen Nelson (review)

As a volume of conference proceedings, Attending to Early Modern Women: Conflict and Concord far exceeds that genre. Based on the 2009 “Attending to Early Modern Women” conference, the final one to be held at the University of Maryland, and carefully edited by Karen Nelson, this collection does more than provide a snapshot of the key plenary contributions of the conference and highlight its central themes of “conflict and concord.” It serves as a wide-ranging introduction to and analytical barometer of this vibrant multidisciplinary field of study, situating it — as well as the women who are its subjects — in time and space. Under the four themes of “Negotiations,” “Economies,” “Faiths and Spiritualities,” and “Pedagogies,” and drawing upon a variety of source materials, the collection points to the many ways in which early modern women worked centrally within their societies, churches, and families, and their respective governing gendered discourses, to claim authority and to negotiate their own positions.

As is clear from Amy Froide’s thoughtful introduction, women’s agency constituted an organizing theme of the 2009 conference, and serves as the leitmotif of the volume. Dovetailing with trends in feminist analysis and women’s studies, this study of early modern women does not confine itself to considering how male texts, artists, and writers represented and/or subordinated women across England and Europe; rather, the focus here is on women’s active participation in their societies and their influence on events and people in situations involving both conflict and concord. Geographically, the focus has shifted as well, moving beyond the borders of Europe to consider the role of women in colonial contexts, including colonizing missions. Silvia Evangelisti follows a newer scholarly trajectory that examines “the osmotic relationship between female religious communities and the cultural and political environments in which they developed” and served (117). She tells the story of María de Ágreda, well-known for her mystical writings in the Spanish Golden Age but much less known for her role in Spanish missionary activities and for her capacity to “bilocate,” to be present in two places at once. While in her convent in Spain, she appeared as a supernatural vision to the Indians in New Mexico, offering them a feminine, saintly image to inspire their conversions (123).

While Evangelisti uses this case study and others to suggest the need to investigate “the symbolic role played by gender in missionary discourse and politics” (128), Holly Hurlburt points to the gap in our knowledge of Christopher Columbus’s sister to suggest the need for further investigation into the role(s) of women and of gender in the imperial discourses of the late medieval Mediterranean. Since men were absent doing “the work of empire,” women were invested with “unusual authority, influence and for some, mobility” (84). Some elite women gained titles and achieved political authority, including Beatriz de Bobadilla, who was the island of Gomera’s governor “when Columbus arrived in 1492 in search of supplies and perhaps more” (87–88). Significantly, the very factors that prevent history from knowing more about Shakespeare’s and Columbus’s sisters, i.e., the burdens of marriage and reproduction and women’s subordination more generally, Hurlburt suggests, also created opportunities for elite women who were positioned at “the elbow of power,” to borrow Anne McClintock’s suggestive phrase (89).

With its focus on women’s agency, action, and authority, this volume connects past and present in enlightening and thought-provoking ways. Indeed, thinking about how we conceptualize the past and our relationship to it is a central theme in Megan Matchinske’s essay, “History’s ‘Silent Whispers’: Representing the Past Through Feeling and Form.” Renaissance historians often undergird the validity of their inquiries by pointing to the distinctness, the unfamiliarity of their objects of study in relation to the present. Yet Matchinske urges us to recognize that “[h]istorical temporality is not linear, drawing a neat and...