Creating Women: Representation, Self-Representation and Agency in the Renaissance ed. by Manuela Scarci (review)

The eleven essays that make up this noteworthy collection emerged, according to the editor, Manuela Scarci, from the larger questions of “What did they [women] create? What was their sense of themselves? How were their identities created?” The breadth of these questions is echoed in the collection’s wide coverage of Western European nationalities and time periods — France, England, Spain, Saxony, and the Italian city-states from the thirteenth through the eighteenth centuries. The contributors add a variety of disciplinary perspectives — from English, French, Spanish, History, Humanities, Renaissance Studies, Architecture, and Gender Studies. While, as a result, the collection may seem diffuse, many of the essays focus on influential and/or prolific women whose writings, agency, and even existence have been generally overlooked. A secondary emphasis is on the ways in which existing (and often contradictory) laws and customs of the period did or did not restrict female agency.

In her introduction, Scarci presents a short, succinct overview of each essay — perhaps too succinct, as readers would have benefitted from an overarching view of the collection as a whole, from consideration of intersecting points between the essays, and from a sense of what the collection as a whole brings to research in this area. Although the variety of perspectives gives an interdisciplinary flavor to the collection, Scarci’s claim that these essays are interdisciplinary in nature is not borne out by the essays themselves, most of which focus on one particular discipline and region. Nonetheless, Scarci has done notable work in shaping a volume that gives a sampling of a number of disciplinary perspectives on early modern women.

While the reading experience of the collection in its entirety can seem somewhat disconnected, the individual essays do an admirable job of discussing their specific areas of expertise. In the first section, on “Women and their Fictions,” Jean-Philippe Beaulieu argues that Joan of Arc was an important model for French, predominantly female, writers; of particular interest is his exploration of how particular historical events inspired changes in representations of this model. Curiously, Beaulieu overlooks the strong emphasis on Joan of Arc as a religious figure, despite the fact that the passages he cites contain numerous religious references. Diane Desrosiers’s “Women’s Voices in the Works of Suzanne de Nervèze” brings to light in interesting ways the deployment of personas and rhetorical styles adopted by this largely overlooked seventeenth-century writer. Desrosiers integrates de Nervèze’s writings with ongoing discussions of female writing and agency; these include the circumstances in which the female modesty topos could be used as an indirectly aggressive weapon and the ways in which these women represent writing as therapeutic to the suffering woman. Renée-Claude Breitenstein’s probing article, “Speaking of Women and Giving Voice to Women,” places seventeenth-century French women writers in historical context by noting the shift away from first-person discourse in mid-seventeenth-century texts by women. Equally valuable is her contextualization of these writings within the popular tradition of the oration, rhetorical manuals, and salon culture. Particularly important here is Breitenstein’s discussion of the notable exception of Scudéry’s Les Femmes illustres, about which she makes the important point that she will not dwell on the “difficult question of attribution, whether to Madeleine or to Georges de Scudéry”; instead, she explores in significant ways the nuances and differences between “speaking for women” and “speaking as women” (46).

The second section, on “Women and their Writings,” is a stimulating but somewhat dispersed grouping of essays on women writers in France and England. Jane Couchman begins this section with “Models for Women in the Letters of Huguenot Noblewomen,” a well-informed overview of three prominent letter writers. Couchman takes issue, in valuable ways, with the notion that only the first generation of Huguenot women writers was activist in public settings. The essay...