SSEMWG: 2025 Awards

Dear Members and Friends,

It is my great pleasure to announce SSEMWG's 2025 Publication Awards, which demonstrate a wide range of excellent scholarship on early modern women and gender being published in multiple categories and disciplines.

Below is the list of awardees and the titles of their publications; attached you will find the citations prepared by the Awards Committee. I'd like to thank my fellow committee members, Liza Blake, Margaret Boyle, Susan Cogan, Ana Maria Diaz Burgos, Kate Driscoll, Tanja Jones, Elizabeth L’Estrange, Tara Lyons, Kate Narveson, and Martine van Elk, for their hard work and thoughtful reviews.

With congratulations to all,

Jennifer L. Welsh, Award Committee Chair

Book Award (Scholarly Monographs)

Winner: Christopher R. Marshall, Artemisia Gentileschi and the Business of Art, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2024.

Christopher Marshall’s book on Artemesia Gentileschi is an exceptional work that takes a new approach to studying Gentileschi by focusing on early modern art as a business

and tracing Gentileschi’s career over multiple locations and stages. The author’s choice to situate her in her wider world of kinship group, art community, and business community reveals her place as an agent in those networks. She emerges not just as a female painter, but as a significant member of a thriving commercial enterprise – something the images in the book communicate as well. In this vein, the chapter on the “afterlives” of Gentileschi’s work is a significant contribution to the field which underscore that Gentileschi was not just an important figure in the art and cultural world of the Renaissance, but also one who has had enduring influence into the modern period both as an artist and as a figure who is part of the growing academic and public interest early modern female artists. In addition, the book itself is stunning, with high production values and abundant color illustrations that highlight connections between Gentileschi’s paintings over the course of her life as well as providing copious examples of contemporary artists who she worked with, inspired, and was inspired by.

First Book Prize

Winner: Julia Rombough's A Veil of Silence.

A Veil of Silence transforms our understanding of women’s lives in Renaissance Italy by investigating sound in relationship to the gendered dynamics of custodial institutions. Bringing to life evocative archival sources, Julia Rombough structures her monograph’s four core chapters around the themes of space, noise, sound, and silence, using this framework to illuminate tensions between enclosure and daily life. In tracing how women inhabited, resisted, and reshaped auditory boundaries, the book brilliantly advances early modern gender history while pushing the study of sound and the senses.

Co-Honorable Mentions:

  • Jungwon Kim, Virtue that Matters

  • Charmiam Mansell, Female Servants in Early Modern England

Essay/Article Award

Winner: Jonathan Powell, “The Case(s) of Thomasine Ostler: Gender, Fiction, and Theatre History in Common Law Court Records”

This carefully crafted article focuses on the legal suits brought by Thomasine Ostler at the court of King’s Bench between 1615 and 1619 both against her father, the actor John Heminges, and the son of Walter Raleigh. Plea rolls of England’s common law courts have often been viewed as repositories recording essential facts, and thus of limited use in interrogating the actualities of the lives and events they documented. Powell offers a new and convincing way of reading these records which is grounded in procedural, linguistic, and documentary contexts, suggesting that this abundant archival repository might represent ‘sites of fiction making’, and offer insights into a range of constructions of early-modern selfhood and interactions. This critical methodology reveals the varied roles that Ostler, a widowed woman, occupied within her own family, professional networks, and English theatre history. More broadly, Powell’s novel approach points to the functionality of an entire class of documents to a wide range of historical inquiry, in particular for the history of early modern women for whom the archive is often a problematic, if non-existent, source.

Honorable mention: Achille Marotta, “The Muslim Friend: Cross-Confessional Male Intimacy in Eighteenth-Century Italy”

This engagingly written article addresses male friendships and masculinities amongst marginalised classes, amplifying the increasingly rich ways in which early modern gender is being explored. Marotta examines archival sources to reveal the anxieties around cross-confessional relations and how these intersected with anxieties around sexual transgression. However, the article also teases out what the records do not obviously reveal: ‘reading the evidence against the sexualising lens of the archive’ the author reimagines the likely very real cross-confessional friendships between Muslim and Christian men that grew up around the ports in Italy. This novel approach to the archive renders visible what were supportive and fulfilling social networks between men that bridged traditional binary divisions (religious, geographic, gendered).

Editions Award (critical editions of primary sources)- Josephine Roberts Award for a Scholarly Edition

Winner: Katherine Gillespie (ed.) – Elizabeth Poole, The Prophetess and the Patriarch: The Visions of an Anti-Regicide in Seventeenth-Century England

Katherine Gillespie’s winning edition of Elizabeth Poole’s prophetic writings demonstrates that radical politics were gender politics in the wake of the English Civil Wars. This first complete edition of Poole’s works balances her contexts and contactswith great clarity and historical precision. Gillespie’s encompassing vision for the volume is evident in the five appendices that situate Poole’s relatively small corpus within her religious networks, allies, and opponents. Richly annotated and meticulously sourced, the edition provides readers with the fullest account to date of Poole’s controversial role in anti-regicide discourse and the resonance her writings carried in later revolutionary times.

Honorable Mention: Shannon Miller (ed.) – Isabella Whitney, Poems by a Sixteenth-Century Gentlewoman, Maid, and Servant

Shannon Miller’s edition of Isabella Whitney’s poems offers an exemplary introduction, exfoliating for the reader multiple ongoing critical debates about Whitney without necessarily choosing sides in that debate. The introduction models a wide range of questions and approaches one might use to read her works, from the biographical, historical, literary historical, and even the stylistic or formal. The notes to the texts signal editorial interventions, gloss difficult or antiquated words, trace Whitney’s classical references, and provide advice on meter and pronunciation. The edition also includes additional work attributed to Whitney, as a possible addition to or expansion of her corpus.

Editions Award (critical editions of primary sources)- Scholarly Edition in Translation

Winner: Daniel Michon (ed. and trans.), D.A. Smith (trans.) – Shadow Puppets, Songs, and Sacred Feasts. Celebrations of the Indo-Portuguese Nuns in the Eighteenth-Century RealConvento de Santa Mónica, Goa, India

Daniel Michon and D.A. Smith’s facing-page edition and translation of these texts—written by and for members of an early modern Portuguese convent in Goa, India—is a model for how to translate transparently and with an insight into the process of translation itself. Notes provide translation alternatives for words with multiple meanings; explain loan words from the Indian context in which the texts were written; and note alternate translations as provided by Borges. Cumulatively, these notes help bring the reader, even one with no knowledge of Portuguese, to appreciate the decisions and alterations inherent to the process of translation.

Honorable Mention: Alice Brooke (ed. and trans.) – Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Critique of a Sermon and Other Letters: Crisis sobre un sermón, Carta de sor Filotea (by Manuel Fernández de Santa Cruz), Respuesta a sor Filotea

Alice Brooke’s facing-page edition and translation of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz’s Critique of a Sermon offers a translation of Sor Juana’s more famous “Letter to Sister Philotea” (a defense of women’s education), while also resolutely situating that letter both in itshistorical context and in Sor Juana’s own writing. Offering both meticulous textual research and analyses of the specific historical meanings and connotations of words used in the original Spanish texts, this edition makes an argument for understanding the treatise Critique as both important context for the “Letter,” and important “in its own right.”

Editions Award (Teaching)

Winner: Theresa Varney Kennedy (ed.) and Paige Tierney (trans.) – Françoise d’Aubigné, Marquise de Maintenon, Dramatic Proverbs

Kennedy and Tierney’s excellent translation of Maintenon’s Dramatic Proverbs—classroom exercises built on active learning pedagogy—offers an accessible volume for use today. The thorough introduction contextualizes Maintenon’s social and educational ambitions, particularly for the impoverished girls at the boarding school she founded at Saint-Cyr. Modern students and instructors will benefit from this early modern model of girls’ role-play education. Emphasizing “readability and natural flow,” the editors ensure the proverbs can be readily staged, with student actors in assigned roles. This edition invites embodied engagement with early modern women’s pedagogical initiatives and with the debates about women’s agency that they both inherited and reanimated.

Graduate Student Conference Presentation Award

Winner: Felicity Sheehy, “Hester Pulter’s Anti-Country House Poetry”

Felicity Sheehy’s conference paper approaches Hester Pulter’s poems on Broadfield, where she lived, as anti-country house poetry, making the case that Pulter used negative depictions of the estate to explore “her vexed relationship with family, fertility, and futurity.” The essay contextualizes Pulter’s poems with ample reference to the genre she transforms and shows, through fine close readings, how she creates her own gendered poetics for the representation of the country estate, drawing the intriguing conclusion that these poems “explore failure through failure, trying the limits of critical appreciation.”

Collaborative Project Award

Winner: Lara Dodds and Michelle M. Dowd, Early Modern Women’s Writing and the Future of Literary History

Early Modern Women’s Writing and the Future of Literary History explains the reasons for the continued marginal status of the study of early modern women’s writing and offers suggestions for how we might overcome this marginality. Lara Dodds and MichelleDowd answer “old questions” and discuss new directions, from premodern critical race studies and feminist formalism to pedagogy. In each instance, an excellent general overview is paired with a deep dive into women’s writing, using up-to-date scholarship. The volume, which models collaborative scholarship and should be read by anyone with an interest in the period, combines valuable insight into the field with fresh ideas and an accessible writing style.

Co- Honorable Mentions:

Carin Franzén and Johanna Vernqvist, eds., Body, Gender, Senses: Subversive Expressions in Early Modern Art and Literature

This volume addresses unconventional ideas about subjectivity developed by women who participated in early modern reconceptualizations of the body, senses, and gender, many of them influenced by Epicureanism. Gaining access to cutting edge ideas through diverse paths (the convent, medicine, the salon), these women developed varied ways to queer dominant conceptions of female subjectivity and claim new forms of authority. The essays range from Spain to Sweden and the 16th through 19th centuries and usefully demonstrate diverse ways in which women seized upon new intellectual possibilities.

Janay Nugent, Cathryn Spence, and Mairi Cowan, Gender in Scotland, 1200–1800: Place, Faith and Politics

Gender in Scotland, 1200-1800 is a model festschrift. Its articles evince how the work of Elizabeth Ewan served as model and inspiration and are witness to her generosity as mentor and collaborator. The richness of Ewan’s scholarship is evident in the wide range of topics it has engendered, from medieval murder to the modern packaging of Edinburgh’s history. Uniformly excellent, the essays are historically and methodologically astute; they make skilled use of the archives, reconstruct the past with attention to intersectionality and the complexity of agency, and show the challenge – or folly – of fixing a line between private and public.

Digital Scholarship, New Media, & Art Award

Winner: Patricia Pender and Rosalind Smith, Editors-in-Chief, “The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Early Modern Women’s Writing”

The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Early Modern Women’s Writing makes an unparalleled contribution to the study of early modern women’s literary and cultural production.Edited by Rosalind Smith and Patricia Pender, it brings together over 260 international scholars to produce more than 400 entries illuminating women’s authorship between 1500 and 1700. As a dynamic, evolving digital resource, it consolidates over fifty years of scholarship on writers, genres, and material practices while opening pathways for new and emerging critical approaches.

Co-Honorable Mentions:

Best Article published in volume 19 of Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal

Winner: Clement, Taylor. “Tracing Women’s Copy Culture: Esther Inglis and the Octonaires” Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal 19:2 (2025): 283-309.

Clement’s article discusses the production, circulation, and impact of Scottish calligrapher Esther Inglis (ca. 1570–1624), situating her within the artistic and economic cultures of the Renaissance. Challenging earlier studies that dismissed her work as merely imitative, Clement places Inglis within a well-developed Renaissance culture of copying while also highlighting her creative innovations that asserted her religious, artistic and professional identity. Clement explores Inglis’s use of self-copying as a means for engaging with her own work and embedding herself within the calligraphic tradition. The article also benefits from the inclusion and analysis of illustrations that show how Inglis sought patronage and fashioned herself as “a scribal publisher and artisan” (299). Clement further connects Inglis to a larger culture of reproduction and identity-making, tracing specific interactions between printing techniques, embroidery patterns, and calligraphy present in her work. A case study of Elizabeth Sharp’s annotated copy of Octonaires (1616) illustrates how readers interacted with Inglis’ texts by copying passages onto blank pages, making their own drawings, or cutting the decorations. Clement’s analysis reveals additional layers of how women were active participants in manuscript culture, providing new avenues for engaging with Renaissance art, patronage, and economics.

Honorable Mention: Spragins, Elizabeth and Emily Colbert Cairns. “Following the Blood Lines in María de Zayas’ “El traidor contra su sangre”” Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal 19:2 (2025): 310-331.

This article explores Spanish writer María de Zayas approach to early modern Spanish honor culture, blood purity, and femicide as seen in her novella “El traidor contra su sangre” (“Traitor to His Own Blood”), part of her 1647 collection Desengaños amorosos (Disenchantments of Love). The collection as a whole portrays the ways in which women are subject to male violence, only escaping through death or life in a convent. The titular “blood” encompasses the male obsession with blood purity and status, the blood of the murdered women as a signifier of innocence, and breast milk as a blood derivative, believed to transmit both nourishment and morality. Sprains and Colbert Cairns situate Zayas’ story within the seventeenth-century Spanish Mediterranean context of misogynistic moral, medical, and literary discourses and dramas that scrutinized the female body and condemned its fluids while also surveilling women’s conduct for signs of deviancy that could jeopardize family bloodlines and honor. Their analysis illuminates Zayas's rewriting of customary legal and familial practices from a female perspective, showing how murdered women's bodies expose the contradictions of the Spanish honor code, and the mechanisms that perpetuate it. As the authors argue, Zayas challenges the violent practices employed by male characters to uphold patriarchal structures by revealing how physical and symbolic representations of blood shaped contemporary debates of the role of women in preserving lineage and sustaining social hierarchies.