Challenging Orthodoxies: The Social and Cultural Worlds of Early Modern Women ed. by Sigrun Haude, and Melinda S. Zook (review)

Almost all of the essays in Challenging Orthodoxies: The Social and Cultural Worlds of Early Modern Women began life, as the book’s useful “Introduction” by Melinda S. Zook explains, as papers delivered at a conference held in 2011 to celebrate the achievements of Hilda L. Smith. The chapters draw widely on the essayists’ earlier research, and also indicate — some more fully than others — the particular importance of Smith’s example or influence. It is consistent with the range and variety of Smith’s impact on the study of women’s history that the resultant book is divided into three distinct sections, each one related to a key area of Smith’s career: “Challenging Cultural and Social Traditions”; “Challenging Scientific and Intellectual Traditions”; and “Challenging Political and Legal Traditions.”

The “Cultural and Social” chapters are contributed by Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks, whose fascinating outline of the case of “the three hairy Gonzales sisters” (treated more extensively in her book on The Marvelous Hairy Girls [2009]) provides some wonderful illustrations. Lois G. Schwoerer explores the surprisingly diverse roles played by women in gun-manufacture and purchase in early modern London. Barbara J. Todd’s quietly gripping analysis of the activities of British women investors before the South Sea Bubble fiasco is one of the two most original and important essays in the collection.

The second, and largest, section of the book, “Challenging Scientific and Intellectual Traditions” is yet more diverse. All the contributors draw on their previous research treating a very wide variety of matters. First, Lisa T. Sarasohn tracks fleas and lice through a great range of early modern texts (including, and centrally, Margaret Cavendish’s), raising questions that readers fortunate enough to have access to the wonderful Early English Books Online facsimiles will be happy to join her (itchily, perhaps) in pondering. Melinda Zook explores women’s involvement in three different periods of crisis in the Anglican church, and thus expands the book’s focus from the early modern to the recent past, via the 1820s. In the third chapter in this section, Judith P. Zinsser diversifies in another way a collection largely devoted to British history by discussing an important French intellectual, Emilie du Châtelet, who argued with Francesco Algarotti, Voltaire, and other less well-known figures in defense of her own scientific conclusions. Ann Thompson’s return to her earlier study of Charlotte Lennox finishes the section by demonstrating with aplomb how firmly that eighteenth-century novelist refused to join in the Shakespeare-worship of her contemporaries.

The book’s final part focuses on a third dimension of Smith’s intellectual interests, “Political and Legal Traditions.” Mihoko Suzuki contributes a characteristically wide-ranging assessment of Englishwomen’s use of legal language in the seventeenth century, calling attention to the frequency with which her chosen examples make reference to the arguments of Sir Edward Coke. Anna Suranyi’s chapter on women’s indentured servitude then stars alongside Todd’s as the most original and important work collected here, drawing as it does on new research in archives and in the Calendar of State Papers, and demonstrating clearly when she is building on the findings of earlier historians. Finally, Berenice A. Carroll uses the works of Virginia Woolf, especially her elusive Three Guineas, to interrogate what might be meant by “power” when investigating women’s relationship to it.

“We think back through our mothers if we are women,” Virginia Woolf remarked, with deceptive simplicity, as she set out (in A Room of One’s Own) to convince an early generation of women undergraduates that there was work for women to do, if the future was to look different from the past, and if the past was to be more fully understood. This volume of “Essays Presented to Hilda L. Smith” clearly marks out the changes created by today...