Studying Early Modern Women Writers: The Digital Humanities Turn

Historically, research on early modern Spanish women writers has primarily centered on individual authors. Although, in the early twentieth century, the polygraph Manuel Serrano y Sanz compiled a general bibliography of several hundred Spanish women writers up to 1805, very little was known about women's literary contributions, and only a few outstanding authors were acknowledged.¹ The goal of the BIESES project (Bibliografía de Escritoras Españolas/Bibliography of Spanish Women Writers) has therefore been to expand our knowledge of individual women writers, but above all to identify and catalog women's writings from 1450 to 1800 so that they may be studied as an integral part of Spain's early modern literary and cultural history.² The history of the BIESES project is divided into three successive stages that began in 2004 with the creation of a database of women's primary texts, documents, and secondary references. In 2013, the project broadened its scope to include numerous editions tagged in TEI-XML; currently, it has begun to study women's writings by means of formal social network analysis.

To date, the project's development has generated several important outcomes, including the study of women's writings as a global, gender-inflected cultural expression and not merely as isolated cases of individual self-representation and the consideration of women's literary production according to social class, space, and location. On the methodological side, the project has employed cultural-sociological critical theories in combination with the digital humanities as the basis for the exploration of a large database of writing both quantitatively and qualitatively. The project's activities have progressed from extensive data-gathering to analyses using data that focuses on women writers' actions in society and their texts as proof of social agency. This essay describes the main features of each of these stages and tools, and explains how our work contributes to the construction of a rich and multi-faceted portrait of early modern women writers.

The Database

The BIESES database currently includes over 12,000 items, focusing in particular on women writers' biographies and writings. The biographical information contains basic data that include the authors' geographical location and chronology. This information may be used to reconstruct women writers' activities in specific locations and at certain times in order to assess group dynamics.³ As part of the women's biographical information, the database includes administrative documents relating to the writers themselves or to their families—such as marriage certificates, testaments, and so on—since family relations are key elements in establishing early modern women's social and private identities. With regard to women's literary production, the BIESES database recognizes the dearth of extant printed works or manuscripts ascribed to women, and, therefore, includes short texts, such as poems, or personal writings, such as letters, as examples of their creative activity. Unlike typical bibliographical catalogs, BIESES gives visibility to this production by itemizing each poem and each letter or brief text as illustrative of a woman's "work" with its own independent record. In the case of the well-known writer Ana Caro, for instance, it is not only possible to retrieve data from her printed or extant manuscript works, but also from the poems she published in other authors' works and even information about her lost works. Moreover, Caro's historical context may be assessed by searching other women writers from Seville to investigate whether any poems, letters, or religious manuscripts may have been written during the same time. The women's feminine literary environment, the number of female writers, and the texts they composed, no matter how brief, all form part of the data that allow scholars to bring women writers to the historical center.

When data tend to cluster at certain historical points, we may recognize temporal junctures or areas where the cultural dynamics favored women. For example, some Castilian women poets mentioned in sixteenth-century sources seemed to illustrate strangely isolated occurrences of women's writing. By clustering all the data about that period (writers' names and places, manuscript and printed texts, and information...