Mapping Gendered Routes and Spaces in the Early Modern World ed. by Merry Wiesner-Hanks (review)

This volume contains essays investigating the relationship between early modern gender and space. The first three assess the current scholarly fields in feminism, world history, and sexuality. Valerie Traub examines how modern approaches to gender, race, class, and sexuality can inform early modern studies. Traub’s fascinating hypothesis is highlighted by her analysis of seventeenth-century cartography. In the maps’ frames, she identifies how European figures in respectable trade attire enforce a heterosexual normality onto a world of exotic and class difference.

The second theoretical essay by editor Merry Wiesner-Hanks examines the critical lack ‘between global history and the history of gender and sexuality’ (p. 59), focusing on intermarriage between different races and religions and exotic androgyny. She concludes that gender offers a rich resource in understanding early modern global history. Charlene Villaseñor Black challenges the accepted model of the male artistic genius. Her essay explores the recent critical contribution to acknowledging and rediscovering early modern Spanish female artists.

Part II starts with Gerhild Scholz Williams examining early modern cross-dressing. Her two illuminating narrative case studies investigate cross-dressing as a means of transcending cultural boundaries. Through poetry, Tara Pedersen next considers Anne Greene’s resurrected life and reputation, comparing Greene’s textual body to Hero’s from Shakespeare’s Much Ado about Nothing. Pedersen’s fascinating argument opens a debate on how women can control their reputation by re-mapping their bodies.

Pamela M. Jones analyses Teresa of Ávila’s previously unstudied ‘official persona as presented in a temporary decorative program – an apparato’ (p. 131). The apparato is a series of paintings, sculptures, inscriptions, and music dedicated to Teresa’s universal holy realm. Jones provides insights into Teresa’s mapped environment as a powerful religious leader and feminist role model. Sara L. French examines the landscape gardens designed by Elizabeth Talbot, Countess of Shrewsbury, famously known as Bess of Hardwick. French’s entertaining essay details how Elizabethans viewed the natural world as a manipulative resource. Her last paragraph is particularly chilling.

In a collaborative essay, fishwives from London and Amsterdam are compared. This semiotic study incorporates mermaids and whore mongering. Dutch fishwives, the authors conclude, had greater marketplace agency than their marginal London counterparts.

Part III begins with Elizabeth A. Lehfeldt’s study of Ana de San Agustin’s autobiography of her life as a Discalced Carmelite nun. Lehfeldt’s particular interest is in a figure of baby Jesus that was kept in a box by a revolving window. Interestingly, the window was located at the intersection between the commercial, outside world and the enclosed cloister. Lehfeldt’s far-reaching essay perfectly exemplifies the volume’s aims.

Kimberlyn Montford examines how, despite patriarchal control and an oppressive Catholic Church, women found autonomy in early modern Roman convents. Montford focuses on the nuns’ music that could be heard throughout Rome. Her essay skilfully unpacks the relationship between enclosed female religious, pious chastity, and the music that seeped into a patriarchal city.

A second collaboration investigates the historicising of events through verbal accounts. The essay details how medieval and early modern women formed strong kinship networks by constructing genealogical narratives through a spatial history. The essay makes the thought-provoking implication that history is in constant flux depending on who is recounting it and when. Another collaborative effort explores women’s role in creating early modern paranoia. In a striking reading of Shakespeare’s Henry V, the essay argues that the French Queen Katherine is a potential threat against the English king. A similar reading is given of Portia in Merchant of Venice and of Goneril and Regan in King Lear. The essay asserts how, together, conspiring women could be a subversive threat without being aggressive.

Part IV starts with Ann Christensen’s discussion of ‘absent husbands and unpartnered wives’ (p. 272). Expanding commercial activities in the New World necessitated that men...