Introduction

Welcome to our Spring 2019 issue. We open with Madeleine Pelling’s “Selling the Duchess: Narratives of Celebrity in A Catalogue of the Portland Museum (1786),” from which we take our cover art: a print of an engraved portrait of Margaret Cavendish Bentinck, Duchess of Portland (1715–85), pasted into Horace Walpole’s personal copy of the Catalogue. Pelling examines how the duchess’s identity as a private collector “extinguished at her death, was subsequently reinvented, positioning her instead as a curiosity to be bought and sold.” In the process, Pelling explores the duchess as celebrity and illustrates how that celebrity was commodified in the sale of her collections. Next, in “The Special Value of Precarious Patrons: Lucrezia Agliardi and the Tradition of Italian Laywomen Church Builders,” Catherine King considers Agliardi’s (ca. 1484–1558) position as a usufructuary, a widow who has been granted the income from her dead husband’s estate for her lifetime; hence, her value as a patron hinges on her good health and longevity. King documents how Agliardi built the church of Sant’Anna at Albino with her usufruct and introduced the female Carmelite Order to the diocese. And finally, Katherine McKenna, in “Women in the Garden: The Decameron Reimagined in Moderata Fonte’s Il Merito delle donne,” demonstrates that Moderata Fonte (1555–1592) engaged deliberately with Boccaccio’s work in her use of “a historicized Italian setting, a brigata of seven discursively adept women, and a garden as the medium to showcase daring female speech.” Through close readings of key passages from Fonte’s work and Giovanni Boccaccio’s cornice, McKenna shows us how Fonte launches her “subversive attack” on the married state and promotes women’s worth through provocatively taking aim at Boccaccio’s repressive depictions of women’s agency, doing so at the beginning of the seventeenth century when “the querelle des femmes began to radicalize in Italy.” These articles, then, showcase a woman whose reputation and taste heavily influence the collectors of the eighteenth-century art world in England; a woman who leaves her mark on the architectural and religious history of Albino; and a woman who sets match to flame, so to speak, as she simultaneously engages with the Italian querelle des femmes at the turn of the seventeenth century and takes on one of the “Three Crowns of Florence,” whose fame rested in part on his participation in the fourteenth-century querelle des femmes.

This issue also includes a wide array of book reviews related to early modern women in France, England, and Spain, as well as in the Ottoman empire, colonial America, Southeast Asia, and northern Europe. As always, we are very grateful to the authors and reviewers whose work fills this issue, and our thanks go also to the submission readers who give generously of their time and expertise.

On a final note, we would like to announce that our next forum, which focuses on “Early Modern Women’s Mobilities,” will appear in the Fall 2019 issue.