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

Mapping Gendered Routes and Spaces in the Early Modern World is an original and illuminating collection whose premise is that the “early modern era was an age when unprecedented numbers of people traveled new routes, and when the spaces they moved in were defined in new ways” (1). Although there has been prolific historical scholarship on travel narratives, this collection approaches travel via the “spatial turn” that examines “connections and interactions, cities and frontiers” while illuminating “the early modern understanding of space/landscape and the place of humans within it” (1). However, its original contribution lies in the distinctly gendered inflection of its central inquiry, concerning how women situated themselves in the early modern world. The conceptual essays included in the “Framework” section offer readers a productive theoretical lens on the gendered nature of all travel experience, as well as the gendered understanding of the production of knowledge, especially of “spatial realms, from the inner spaces of the body to the furthest reaches of the globe” (1).

Offering a rich multi-disciplinary perspective, this collection should appeal broadly to scholars, students, and readers in fields ranging from early modern history, cartography, ethnography, and art history, to sexuality studies and gender theory, among others. The essays collectively take us on varied and enriching journeys into representations of particular spaces—textual, visual, and material—in the early modern period: maps, religious paintings, Shakespearean texts, gardens, convents, and fish markets, to name a few. In their emphasis on historical perspective, these essays eschew conventional teleologies to focus instead on border crossings and interactions within histories “of connections, exchanges, and interactions, as well as hybridity and mixture” (3). In sum, they complicate and pluralize our understanding of globalization in the early modern world.

In the first essay, Valerie Traub sets up complex theoretical coordinates for linking the imaginings of geopolitical territory and of anatomical representations of the body. Through various feminist “intersectional” and multi-faceted perspectives, Traub offers suggestive analogies between maps and anatomy texts to point to their relevance for feminist inquiries into “multiple forms and systems of identity and difference” (39). Her analyses of the “contextual frames” of early modern maps produce creative offerings (via illustrations) of the placement of human figures in the so-called scientific, abstract space of maps, while showing how cartographic knowledge was inflected by “intersectional deployments of race, ethnicity, religion, gender, and sexuality” (47).

The second, equally productive framing essay, by Merry Wiesner-Hanks, “Early Modern Gender and the Global Turn,” calls for attending to the intersection between a history of early modern globalization—of geographical, commercial, and cultural border-crossings—and issues surrounding the blurring and crossing of borders in terms of sexuality and gender. Thus, she argues for more interconnections and crossovers between the “materialist tradition in world and global history” and the “largely cultural history of gender and sexuality” (60). As examples of such intermingling, she offers illuminating accounts of intermarriages that crossed some kind of “ethnic, cultural, religious, [or] other boundary”(61), including intermarriage across such borders in North America, West Africa, and Europe, as well as of “third, and transgender” relationships in a variety of locations. Overall, this essay advances an interesting new “turn” on the global by focusing on “borders and the bodies that crossed them” (61).

The final essay in this section, by Charlene Villaseñor Black, extends the exploration of gender crossings across global boundaries, in this instance focusing on the feminist reappraisals of Spanish art history. This essay brings to light the growing art historical scholarship on gender and representation in the early modern Hispanic world, specifically on topics such as women artists in Golden Age Spain, gendered representations and patronage, and gender and vice-regal art centered on the colonial Americas. It is particularly effective in showing, through striking illustrations, the dynamic tensions within Hispanic culture, a site of both gendered stereotypes and of...