SSEMWG 2024 Awards
Book Award (Scholarly Monographs)
Winner:
Elizabeth L’Estrange. Anne de Graville and Women's Literary Networks in Early Modern France. D. S. Brewer, 2023.
Anne de Graville and Women's Literary Networks in Early Modern France combines meticulous archival and bibliographicalresearch with innovative literary analysis. Offering a detailed reconstruction of De Graville’s library and her writings, Elizabeth L’Estrange argues that we need to see De Graville’s activities as an author as informed by her participation in a community of book owners and readers. Alert to family interests, social networks, and political shifts, L’Estrange shows that contributions to the querelles des femmes could take a wide variety of forms and calls attention to an often-ignored period in literary history between Christine de Pizan and Marguerite de Navarre. This lavishly illustrated and well-written book offers a fascinating account of the concerns animating one woman’s complex involvement in the world of books.
Co-honorable Mention:
Christina Luckyj. Liberty and the Politics of the Female Voice in early Stuart England. Cambridge University Press, 2022.
Liberty and the Politics of the Female Voice in Early Stuart England represents a significant contribution to the study of writers such as Cary, Speght, Lanyer, and Wroth. Responding to the emphasis in current scholarship on patriarchal attempts to curb the voice of unruly women, Christina Luckyj traces a tradition of godly resistance in writing by both men and women that uses the authority of women’s voices to speak out against tyranny. Luckyj’s grasp of the way religion drove political engagement allows her to resituate women writers in a specific historical context that freshly illuminates their texts.
Co-honorable Mention:
Helena Taylor. Women Writing Antiquity: Gender and Learning in Early Modern France. Oxford University Press, 2024.
Women Writing Antiquity opens up the study of early modern French literary culture by analyzing women writers’ representation of their relation to classical learning and their incorporation of classical sources in a wide variety of genres. In a series of case studies, Helena Taylor examines how women drew on classical literature, not only in belles lettres, but also in translation, imitation, commentary, popular fiction, and philosophy. Shifts in the representation of the learned woman and in how women used classical literature serve, Taylor shows, as a register of ideas and debates about literary taste and authority.
First Book Prize
Winner:
Catherine Powell-Warren, Gender and Self-Fashioning at the Intersection of Art and Science: Agnes Block, Botany, and Networks in the Dutch 17th Century. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2023.
Catherine Powell-Warren has taken a multipronged approach to the rich life of Agnes Block, using maps and texts to rebuild the manor complex at Vijverhof where Block built and maintained a substantial and valuable collection of botanical specimens from around the globe and examining Block’s own self-fashioning as a woman of scientific knowledge and patronage. Through meticulous work across visual and written source material, she is able to position Block as part of the wealthy Mennonite community in the Netherlands, in relation to other women engaged in similar botanical endeavors, and within the larger scientific and botanical networks across the Netherlands and Europe. This book models strategies for reconstructing the active participation of women in scientific and artistic networks in the seventeenth century.
Co-Honorable Mentions:
Heather Meek, Reimagining Illness: Women Writers and Medicine in Eighteenth-Century Britain. Montreal, CA: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2023.
Chelsea Phillips, Carrying All Before Her: Celebrity Pregnancy and the London Stage, 1689-1800. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2022.
The subcommittee awarded honorable mentions to Heather Meek’s Reimagining Illness: Women Writers and Medicine in Eighteenth-Century Britain and Chelsea Phillip’s Carrying All Before Her: Celebrity Pregnancy and the London Stage, 1689-1800. Across six chapters detailing the medical knowledge and experiences of six different women, Meeks illuminates the complex relationship between women, medicine, and women’s health at a time when medical knowledge and practice was in flux. Phillips provides a fascinating and timely examination of the sometimes surprising ways in which actresses’ careers and public reputation were affected both positively and negatively by pregnancy.
Essay/Article Award
Winner:
Cathy McClive and Lisa Smith. “Women at the Center: Medical Entrepreneurialism and ‘La grande médecine’ in Eighteenth-Century Lyon.” French History 38 (2024): 1-27.
Honorable Mention:
Erin Kramer. “That she shall be banished from this country’: Alcohol, Covereignty, and Social Segregation in New Netherland.” Early American Studies 20 (2022): 3-42.
Both the award-winning essay and our honorable mention make unique contributions to the study of women and gender and open up potential avenues of further study. In their article on two silk workers in Lyon who ran a thriving medical business for decades, Cathy McClive and Lisa Smith provide a rich tapestry that reveals how two silk-workers and self-defined ‘chymists’ and herbalists created networks that were central rather than marginal to the medical marketplace (at a time of increasing male professionalization of the field). In addition, McClive and Smith tell a fascinating story of archival preservation by chance and how that affects the stories we are able to tell. Erin Kramer focuses on how alcohol became a subject of deep concern for Indigenous nations and settler governments in Dutch colonial America and how Dutch women tavern keepers became the target of gendered enforcement policies that expressed concerns over domestic spaces as well as racial interactions.
Editions Award (critical editions of primary sources)- Josephine Roberts Award for a Scholarly Edition
Winner:
Paola De Santo and Caterina Mongiat Farina, editors and translators. Letters. By Isabella Andreini. The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe: The Toronto Series, 100. Toronto: Iter Press, 2023.
Isabella Andreini’s Letters was a wildly popular text in seventeenth-century Italy, going through nineteen editions in the first 60 years after its initial publication in 1607. This monumental edition and translation of the Letters condenses a study of the volume’s complicated textual history into an accessible and appealing collection that could prompt a systematic study or be easily excerpted in classroom settings. This edition not only is grounded in extensive textual research and careful translation decisions, but also makes that textual work accessible to the readers and users of the edition: The introduction offers a comprehensive and detailed overview and analysis of the book’s textual history and reception, and the textual notes to the text itself alert readers to variants across editions, and moments where the English translation obscures a potential Italian pun. The introduction considers the collection as a whole, even as it trains the reader to understand the individual letters as “modules, independent units of meaning” that can be “recombined”; the Appendices, listing all topics and illustrating how different letters speak to one another across the volume, will make this text easily accessible to scholars, teachers, and students of early modern women.
Editions Award (critical editions of primary sources)- Scholarly Edition in Translation
Winner:
Angela Hunter and Rebecca Wilkin, editors and translators. Louise Dupin’s Work on Women: Selections. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023.
Angela Hunter and Rebecca Wilkin’s masterful edition and translation of Louise Dupin’s Work on Women makes accessible to scholars and students alike, for the first time, “the most in-depth feminist work of eighteenth-century France” (4). They provide detailed introductions to each of the volume’s four sections—Science, History and Religion, Law, and Education and Mores—that offer historical context and develop the volume’s positioning of Dupin as a feminist thinker who intimately understood the structural and discursive inequalities that marginalized women in 18th-century France. This is also the story of Dupin’s own life as a woman writer, whose work was both facilitated and silenced by men, including Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who was her secretary. Hunter and Wilkin include detailed textual notes on the selected texts (twenty-six of thirty-five that are “complete or likely near completion”) and their translation decisions (xiii); helpful historical context; a timeline of Dupin’s life; and, appendices that chart “Work on WomenArticles and Manuscript Pieces” and “Anicet Sénéchal’s Inventory and Ordering of Manuscript.” This multi-layered volume of Dupin’s work in translation is applicable across scholarly disciplines and will garner broad appeal, from undergraduate students to scholars interested in women’s intellectual and cultural history, political and moral philosophy, science, and the law.
Graduate Student Conference Presentation Award
Winner:
Arya Shurshbabu. “Aemilia Lanyer’s ‘Like Similies” presented at the Renaissance Society of America Annual Meeting, 2024.
In this cleverly written conference paper about a clever early modern writer, Arya Sureshbabu explores how English poet Aemilia Lanyer theorizes the intimacy that similies create within “The Description of Cooke-ham” and also with her readers. By focusing on Lanyer’s use of the simile to create an ars poetica, Sureshbabu analyzes the effects of this rhetorical figure in terms of syntax, content, and organization of the book of poems “Salve Deus,” which “Cooke-ham” concludes. As Sureshbabu states, similies allow Lanyer to present multiple interpretations of a concept or a relationship—such as patronage, romance, or friendship—, while its components remain intrinsically connected despite their differences. As a result, Sureshbabu argues, that Lanyer presents to her readers “other modes of similitude” which shape women’s connections to nature, love, and writing.
Collaborative Project Award
Winner:
Andaleeb Badiee Banta, Alexa Greist, and Theresa Kutasz Christensen, eds., Making Her Mark: A History of Women Artists in Europe, 1400-1800. Goose Lane Editions, 2023.
This exhibition catalog celebrates the achievements of women makers and creators by centering their experiences, desires, and artistic production. The editorial team achieves this feat by abandoning the Master Narrative of illustrious painters and sculpturers, where female practitioners exist as spectacular exceptions that nonetheless conform to patriarchal ideals of the elite “master artist.” Instead, the essays and catalog entries reconstruct the histories of a wide variety of media, ranging from embroidery to furniture design to silverwork, as well as many different painted and sculptural objects. The essays address these works within multiple contexts, creating a rich tapestry of meaning reflective of the variety of female experiences with artmaking in Early Modern Europe.
Honorable Mention:
Elizabeth S. Cohen and Marlee J. Couling, eds. Non-Elite Women’s Networks Across the Early Modern World. Amsterdam University Press, 2023.
The essays in this volume highlight strategies that non-elite or marginalized women, a “doubly invisible” element of the early modern population, employed to build and use networks to create community and address a range of challenges- personal, familial, professional, spiritual. Drawing upon an array of primary sources, including court records, travel writing, hagiography, and letters, the authors examine women’s experiences across geographies (Europe, trans-Mediterranean, and Colonial American) to reveal the often over-looked networking strategies through which women gained agency, forming and maintaining valuable alliances that might, among other functions, mediate domestic violence, advance careers, and form spiritual communities.
Digital Scholarship, New Media, & Art Award
Winner:
Noelia García Pérez (Scientific Director) and Miguel Falomir (Museum Director). El Prado en Femenino/The Prado: The Female Perspective, Promotoras artisticas de las colecciones del Museo (1451-1633), El Museo del Prado, 2021-2023.
The El Prado en Feminino/The Prado: The Female Perspective, Promotoras artisticas de la colecciones del Museo (1451-1633) is a groundbreaking, ongoing project that presents the field of Early Modern Gender Studies to a wide variety of audiences, not only by providing important resources for scholars but also by creating engaging content for the general public (including children). The committee would like to highlight the many aspects of the project that work together to create an incredibly accessible, multifaceted experience, ranging from museum visit itineraries to social media content and formal scholarly lectures archived on YouTube. The conceptual approach to already existing material in the Prado’s collection, not only in terms of the objects themselves but also their installation, reveals the monumental benefit of applying new approaches and discourses within a museum setting. As a successful model for other institutions, the committee believes that El Prado en Feminino will continue to impact the field for many years to come.
Honorable Mention:
Sylvia Cervantes Blush (Director), Margaret Boyle (Dramaturg), and Ireri Chávez Bárcenas (Music). “Ana Caro’s Agravio y Mujer / Valor, Outrage, and Woman” performed at Bowdoin College, February 29-March 2, 2024.
This production performed at Bowdoin College in Spring 2024 opens up a fascinating perspective on Spanish early modern comedias to contemporary audiences. A thoughtful and interdisciplinary dialogue between director, Sylvia Cervantes Blush, dramaturg, Margaret Boyle, and music consultant, Ireri Chávez Bárcenas, brings to the fore continuities and ruptures of the ways in which Ana Caro’s characters disrupted gender expectations. In this version of the play, based on the English translation from UCLA’S Working Group on the Comedia in Translation and Performance, the audience is presented with the inclusion of bilingual expressions the development of a Baroque Noir aesthetic, and a set of early modern trans-Atlantic musical arrangements, which frame Caro’s social and gender critiques and emphasize their relevance nowadays. The recording of the performance and the post-show conversations with a variety of experts reveal the need of such collaborative projects to make accessible and diversify early modern theater.
Best Article published in volume 17 of Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal
Winner:
Elizabeth A. Lehfeldt. “‘Contrary to Reason’: The Absence of Enclosure in Early Modern Convents” Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal 18 (2023): 3-24.
This article challenges the historical narrative of enclosure as the story of either male ecclesiastical attempts to discipline wayward nuns or of feminine resistance against oppressive clergy. Instead, Lehfeldt uses close consideration of historical evidence to reconstruct the lived realities and agency of nuns themselves, who may have lived in the absence of enclosure or even advocated for their own clausration. ‘Contrary to Reason’ questions bedrock assumptions concerning the use and understanding of enclosure and provides new frameworks for articulating its presence, absence, and impacts. This radical historical revision has broad implications across temporal and spatial realities in the early modern world well beyond the specific case studies discussed by the author. The approachability of the prose and clarity of argument ensure that this article will transform the field, both in scholarly discourse and in the classroom.