Women Classical Scholars: Unsealing the Fountain from the Renaissance to Jacqueline de Romilly ed. by Rosie Wyles and Edith Hall (review)

For researchers invested in tracing the histories of women, or "unsealing the fountain" of knowledge about their lives, this book is a revelation. Collecting and analyzing what we know about women scholars who translated, wrote about, and promoted classical texts from various cultural locations in Europe, the book contributes in significant and concrete ways to debates about how to understand the role of women in shaping European learned culture. Avoiding the clichés of exceptionalist rhetoric as well as the idealization of female figures who pursued classical textual study in defiance or negotiated acknowledgement of cultural norms, the detailed essays collected here reveal the value of tracing local histories of education, influence, and community for understanding the intellectual lives of historical women.

While the collection includes research on women classical philologists up to the twentieth century, this review will focus on roughly the first half of the book, comprising the essays on women writing before 1800. The editors were conveners of a conference on women classicists at King's College, London, in 2013, and reading the resulting scholarship makes one wish to have been in the company of these women at what must have been an exciting event. The volume includes chapters focused on the lives of approximately a dozen early modern women scholars, but it opens with an acknowledgement (and an attempt at an index) of the many women, writing in various languages, who were not included in the volume for reasons of scope or contributor expertise. The introduction also gestures toward the ways the volume represents an acknowledgement of the work of a "matrilineal" tradition, as women scholars in Classics departments trained each other over generations and passed on what they knew about the work of these earlier women intellectuals located outside the context of the modern university. This generous beginning to the volume is indicative of the tone of the whole, which is dedicated to presenting in some modest detail the lives and works of women. It was illuminating how many of these women scholars I did not know.

In addition to tracing some themes that arise in this collection of recorded lives, the introduction outlines many of the barriers and stigmas women scholars confronted in early Europe, and it makes the clear claim to rewriting a history of Classics as an area of disciplinary inquiry that has been characterized by systemic gender bias. Hall and Wyles point out, for instance, that many classical texts were first translated into the vernacular by women. They also bring into focus similarities and patterns in the intellectual lives sketched in the volume: the advantageous financial and social status of many of these women, their reliance on networks of both male and female scholars through letter-writing, their expressions (often tropic gestures) of boredom alleviated by intellectual activity, the prevalence of certain classical authors as the focus of their work, and the fact that they often came from families with "advanced views on female education" (15). Situating the chapters that follow within this general context of overturning historical and disciplinary narratives, the introduction raises the level of complexity of characterizations of classical scholarship by providing multiple, diverse examples of women doing this work over a long stretch of history.

The contributors provide brief but detailed discussions—sometimes based on the historical record and sometimes on the translations and texts themselves—of many intriguing questions inspired by research on the history of women. Carmel McCallum-Barry, for instance, focusing on the early Renaissance, traces the lives of three women translators of religious works who were supported by a community of male humanists; these men defended the quality and sometimes even the equality of these writings by women, while insisting on the translator's piety and modesty. Sophia Frade explores the classical scholar Luisa Sigea, who, with...