Introduction

In this, the spring 2017 issue of EMWJ, we are pleased to present four articles that address the manner in which women questioned and innovatively challenged economic, political, spatial, and iconographical conventions in early modern Spain, England, and Italy. Through archival research and literary and art historical analyses, each essay discovers the uncommon ways by which women reshaped traditional views. The double-authored article that opens this issue focuses on maternal lactation contracts that granted economic compensation to mothers who breast-fed and reared their own children. The authors, María del Carmen García Herrero and Cristina Pérez Galán, present archival evidence to demonstrate that the contracts, which were requested by single and widowed women and unique to the Kingdom of Aragon, were based on the argument that maternal breastfeeding was equivalent to wet-nursing, one of the most valued female labor activities. In "A ringworm on the neck of greatness," Rachel M. de Smith Roberts shows that Elizabeth Cary's disparaging discourse of Edward II's court through her metaphors of bodies, infection, and purgation parallels a critique of the courts of James I and Charles I, who also relied on powerful favorites. In revealing the insidious effects of favoritism, Cary challenges the conventional political image of "the king's two bodies" and extends her appeal to Stuart readers.

In another contribution on Spain, "Women, Space, and Power," Nieves Romero-Díaz explores how spaces that male authorities often defined in gendered terms were subverted in practice by women who traversed their presumed private and public boundaries. The author discusses the cases of two formidable women, Luisa de Carvajal y Mendoza and María de Guevara, to show how these women transformed spaces in which they negotiated social relations, recreating them both through their writings and actions. In death, women also challenged acceptable female gender norms, as we see in the final article of this issue by Caroline Castiglione and Suzanne Scanlan, "Death Did Not Become Her." The authors raise the question of how to commemorate unconventional women with existing iconographical conventions. By analyzing one such moment of rupture, marked by the massive tomb built to commemorate Eleonora Boncompagni Borghese, the authors show how new representations were forged and instituted in the funeral monuments of early modern Rome.

A special contribution to this issue is the illuminating dialogue between Shannon McHugh and Margaret F. Rosenthal that extends the discussion of interpretations of early modern women by contemporary films that we featured in EMWJ 10.2. Here, McHugh and Rosenthal discuss the transformation of Rosenthal's book, The Honest Courtesan: Veronica Franco, Citizen and Writer in Sixteenth-Century Venice (1992), into the film Dangerous Beauty (1998). Their conversation offers a revealing view of the often-fraught process of converting a historical work into Hollywood fiction.

Heading a cluster of review of websites on early modern women is Deanna Shemek's plenary for the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women at the Sixteenth Century Studies Conference in 2015 that addressed the Isabella d'Este Archive. Inspired by Shemek's keynote, the editors of EMWJ commissioned nine reviews of other websites that treat women artists, writers, queens consort, material cultures, and recipes across early modern Europe. The contributions are enhanced by helpful information for our readers on the navigation and use of the digital sources, including illustrative screenshots highlighting their contents.

In the next section, the journal continues its established tradition of covering art exhibitions with informative reviews of four major events. These exhibits present the works of Clara Peeters in Antwerp and Madrid; Maria Sybilla Merian in London; and Elisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun in New York and Paris. The final entry in this section gives us a revisionary view of the small but significant world of dollhouses, reviewing an exhibit in London and Washington, D.C.

Margaret Hannay, distinguished scholar of Mary Sidney and Mary Wroth, was an important founder of the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women and generous mentor to younger scholars. We honor her career and legacy through a group tribute, which was expertly compiled by Martine van Elke. As we go to press, we...