2026 Society for the Study of Early Modern Women and Gender Publication Awards

Committee Chair: Jennifer L. Welsh

Book Award (Scholarly Monographs)

Subcommittee: Theresa Christensen and Susan Cogan

Winner: Dopfel, Costanza G., Women, Fertility, and Maternal Art in Renaissance Florence. Routledge, 2025.

With this book, Dopfel offers a new model of multidisciplinary analysis that weaves together art history, sociology, and social history to reveal how visual culture responded to demographic devastation from plague and reshaped gendered expectations about fertility and childbirth in Renaissance Florence. Through meticulous research, Dopfel details how both Marian and lay art changed during the fourteenth century, emphasizing the role of women in rebuilding the Florentine population and how prescription both drove and reflected new practices and shifts in social values. This thought-provoking work encourages us to consider Florentine art in new and expanded contexts. Superbly written, it is accessible to specialists and non-specialists alike.

Honorable Mentions:

Brosnan, Kelsey. Anne Vallayer-Coster. Getty Publications, 2026.

This rigorously researched, richly illustrated book guides readers through the career of Anne Vallayer-Coster, an accomplished painter in late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth century France. Throughout, the author examines the artist's life and work within the context of the male-dominated art world, her navigation of that world, and how gender discourse shaped both the art she produced and its reception. Brosnan's nuanced discussion of the cultural and artistic contexts in which different types of still life paintings operated makes her contributions broadly relevant beyond the details of Vallayer-Coster's biography. The color illustrations are stunning and the prose is engaging and accessible for specialists and non-specialists alike.

Hall, Kim F. The Sweet Taste of Empire: Sugar, Mastery, and Pleasure in the Anglo Caribbean. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2025.

In this book, Hall provides an expertly written text which dances between elements that revolt and enchant in an exploration of the pains and pleasures associated with the early modern sugar trade. While the subject of the work is not explicitly focused on women and gender, Hall provides a model wherein the question of early modern gender roles and the experiences of women are foregrounded as essential frameworks for understanding everything from colonial economies to literature, slavery, and gastronomy. Drawing on a wide range of textual sources, readers from across disciplines will be drawn in by Hall's deep engagement with her material; the work will appeal to specialists and non-specialists alike.

First Book Prize:

Subcommittee: Margaret Boyle and Tara Lyons

Winner: Nicholson, Annalisa. A Salon-in-Exile: Hortense Mancini and the French Diaspora in Restoration London. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2025.

Annalisa Nicholson’s A Salon-in-Exile makes an important contribution to the study of early modern women by recovering the intellectual and cultural influence of Hortense Mancini and her celebrated salon in Restoration London. Challenging the longstanding association of salon culture with France, Nicholson asks what happened when a woman-led intellectual circle went into exile and established itself in a new nation, across multiple languages. Her study reveals how Mancini and the community she gathered around her helped shape Anglo-French literary culture, bringing women’s intellectual activities into histories too often divided along national boundaries. Particularly impressive is her command of an extensive range of archival sources, which allows her to reconstruct the people and relationships that sustained the salon, as well as the literary works produced within it. Two substantial appendices documenting the salon’s membership and operatic productions attest to the depth of her research and provide valuable resources for future scholars. The reach across literary texts is also worth highlighting, including letters, memoirs, plays, operas and essays. By placing Mancini and her circle in the context of Pan-European cultural exchange, Nicholson demonstrates how women in exile could establish intellectual communities whose influence extended across languages and national borders.

Honorable Mentions:

Kaelin, Kelly. Women, Race, and the Moravian Church in the Early Modern Atlantic World: Convert, Migrant, Missionary. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2025.

Beranek, Saskia. The Cultural Work of the Early Modern Dutch Portrait Amalia van Solms and the Shape of the Self in European Art. Routledge, 2026.

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

Subcommittee: Kate Driscoll and Serena Laiena

Winner: Julia L. Hairston and John C. McLucas, Tullia d’ Aragona: The Wretch, Otherwise Known as Guerrino: A Bilingual Edition. Translation by John C. McLucas. Edited with a critical introduction by Julia L. Hairston. Annotated by Julia L. Hairston and John C. McLucas. The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe: The Toronto Series 106. Iter Press. 2025.

Julia L. Hairston and John C. McLucas’s monumental edition of Tullia d’Aragona’s The Wretch brings the first epic poem authored by an Italian woman fully to English-language readers. Across thirty-six cantos and more than 1,000 pages, McLucas’s excellent translation and Hairston’s meticulously edited Italian text exemplify scholarly precision and collaborative achievement. A rich critical introduction and rigorous annotations throughout illuminate the poem’s literary and historical contexts, while the exceptionally useful character list guides readers through its sprawling narrative, identifying figures and tracing their various appearances. Monumental in scope and exacting in execution, this edition represents collaborative scholarship of the highest order.

Honorable Mention: Claire Bowditch, Jennie Challinor, and Elaine Hobby, eds., Aphra Behn Plays 1676–1678, Cambridge University Press, 2026.

This second volume of plays by, or historically attributed to, Aphra Behn is a laudable achievement of collaborative scholarship. In the introductory sections, the three editors offer detailed accounts of the linguistic, cultural, and political contexts in which each of the five plays was produced, alongside valuable analysis of their performance histories. Philologically rigorous, the editors reconstruct base texts that most closely reflect authorial intention, systematically collating them with editions produced during Behn’s lifetime, when available. The conservative approach as well as the extensive textual and explanatory notes provide readers with an informed and richly rewarding window into Behn’s writing.

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

Subcommittee: Kate Driscoll and Serena Laiena

Winner: Nicholson, Annalisa, ed. and trans. Hortense Mancini, Letters: A Bilingual Edition. The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe: The Toronto Series 112. Iter Press, 2025.

Annalisa Nicholson’s landmark bilingual edition of Hortense Mancini’s Letters offers the first published collection of this remarkable correspondence, spanning Mancini’s early years and marriage through her exile and final exchanges. Read alongside Mancini’s celebrated Memoirs, the letters provide companionate perspectives on her pursuit of autonomy and her networks of connection. Nicholson’s introduction supplies essential biographical context, while the exceptionally thorough account of editorial methods models fine scholarly transparency. Based on manuscript sources, the translation balances precision with accessibility, as does the thoughtful modernization of Mancini’s French. This stellar edition makes Mancini’s correspondence available to broad readership.

Honorable mentions:

Prescott, Sarah, Marie-Louise Coolahan, Sarah Dunnigan, Wes Hamrick, Kate Louise Mathis, and Cathryn A. Charnell-White, eds. Women’s Poetry from Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, 1400–1800: An Anthology, Cambridge University Press, 2026.

Sarah Prescott, Marie-Louise Coolahan, Sarah Dunnigan, Wes Hamrick, Kate Louise Mathis, and Cathryn A. Charnell-White’s ambitious anthology transforms our understanding of women’s poetry across Ireland, Scotland, and Wales from 1400 to 1800. Nearly 700 pages recover the multilingual work of approximately one hundred women writers. Exceptional linguistic expertise underpins the dual-language texts, judicious translations, detailed historical annotations, and illuminating author biographies. The editors’ lucid accounts of selection, translation, and editorial principles demonstrate considerable methodological rigor. Organized across two chronological sections and supplemented by national bibliographies, this anthology brings together an extraordinary range of too-rarely-heard voices.

Marie-José Govers, ed. and trans. Jehan Baptista Houwaert. The Excellence and Nobility of Women: A Defense of Women (1582–1583) for the Women of Belgica; A Bilingual Edition. The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe: The Toronto Series 115. New York: Iter Press. 2025.

Marie-José Govers’s bilingual edition of Jehan Baptista Houwaert’s On the Excellence and Nobility of Women makes the first defense of women published by a Netherlandish author available in English for the first time. Govers’s rich introduction expertly reconstructs the textual traditions through which defenses of women circulated in the Netherlands and illuminates Houwaert’s overlapping religious, political, and literary contexts. The edition presents Book 8 of The Plain of the Nine Muses, or The Pleasure Garden of Virtuous Women, alongside other contextualizing excerpts. Extensive source annotations and an invaluable index of exemplary women distinguish this deeply learned volume.

Editions Award (Teaching)

Subcommittee: Kate Driscoll and Serena Laiena

Winner: Anne R. Larsen, and Colette H. Winn, ed. and trans., Martine de Bertereau and Marie Meurdrac. At the Crossroads of the Scientific Revolution: Two French Seventeenth-Century Women of Science. The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe: The Toronto Series 113. New York and Toronto: Iter Press, 2026.

This outstanding edition makes two texts by seventeenth-century French women scientists highly accessible to scholars and students working in English. The volume offers thorough contextualization of the lives and careers of mineralogist and hydrogeologist de Bertereau and alchemist and chemist Meurdrac, framed in light of the Scientific Revolution and contemporary historical events. Careful explanations of scientific terminology, detailed references to the medieval and Renaissance treatises and theories on which the authors draw, rich appendices, and notes provide invaluable tools for classroom discussion. This volume is a very welcome, exceptional window on the breadth of early modern women’s hands-on involvement in the sciences.

Honorable Mention: Mulligan, Bret et al., eds. Elizabeth Jane Westonia: Selected Works of Elizabeth Jane Weston. Williamsburg, VA: Pixelia Publishing, 2025. ISBN: 978-1-7370330-8-0

This edition is a productive and pedagogically engaged collaboration between faculty and students, successfully reintroducing a Neo-Latin female voice to the study of a male-dominated language. The volume offers valuable contextualization of Weston’s life and works. The decision to include poems featuring classical Latin figures rather than the authors’ contemporaries is especially attentive to student readers and the volume’s pedagogical aims. Clear explanations of Weston’s distinctive stylistic and metrical choices make her Latin highly accessible, while the running vocabulary and commentary, complemented by a glossary, provide practical support for reading and teaching.

Collaborative Project:

Subcommittee: Erin McCarthy and Kate Narveson

Winner: Arshad, Yasmin and Chris Laoutaris , eds. Women and Cultures of Portraiture in the British Literary Renaissance, (Bloomsbury: The Arden Shakespeare, 2026).

Women and Cultures of Portraiture explores the activity of early modern women in shaping their representations. To ground the volume’s interdisciplinary methodology, the introduction surveys developments in theory that connect analyses of power, representation, and gender, while a focus on “intermedial activity” captures the varied ways portraiture (broadly understood) was created and used. The essays in Part 1 uncover unexpected uses of elite portraiture; those in Part 2 analyze how “portraiture” can “appropriate, recycle, intersect with, and co-opt” meanings encoded in masculinist practices; the concluding essays focus on women’s networks. Carefully researched and theorized, the essays point new directions in how to see both portraiture and women’s agency in shaping it.

Honorable Mentions :

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830: Vol.15: Iss.2 Volume 15, Issue 2 (2025) Scholarship Special Issue, Affective and Emotional Encounters; Introduction and nine essays on British Women’s Writing, 1600-1800 (Introductory essay by Anna-Rose Shack, Zoë Van Cauwenberg, and Fauve Vandenberghe)

This special issue usefully interconnects three features that have emerged from studies of the history of affectivity and emotions: women writers’ interest in the connection between emotion and knowledge; their uses of form to engender emotion; and the influence of emotion on critical reception, both historically and in modern criticism. The introduction and opening essay establish the features’ interconnection; further essays develop well-researched case studies. The essays employ a variety of critical approaches but their shared attention to the issue’s central features give the volume unity and model fresh ways to approach both women’s writing and its reception.

Guengerich, Sara and Almorza, Amelia, eds. “Female Lives in Motion. Transatlantic Migration and Mobilities of Women of Color and Spanish Women in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries.” In Colonial Latin American Review 34.4 (2025): 403-549. Released in January 2026.

This special issue illuminates the significant roles women, including Spanish, Indigenous, Black, and mestiza women, played in the early Spanish Atlantic. These women—enslaved, free, noble, royal—made economic, religious, legal, and affective contributions as diverse as they were themselves. Throughout the volume, we learn about women’s agency and their willingness, even desire, to cross the Atlantic, sometimes more than once, and to travel further afield. Contributions, in both English and Spanish, are meticulously researched and engagingly written, often recovering named women in surprising detail. Taken together, the volume highlights the varied yet pervasive influence of women throughout the Spanish Empire.

Essay/Article:

Subcommittee: Tanja Jones and Elizabeth L’Estrange

Winner: Fei, Du. “Fatima’s Inheritance: Law, Islam, and Gendered Archive-Making in India’s Early Modern Global Connections.” Past & Present 266, no. 1 (2025): 40–74.

This article traces the archival and interpretive history of a rare, early seventeenth-century text recording a lawsuit brought in the maritime city of Surat by a Muslim woman, called Fatima, as she attempted to regain her family inheritance. Whilst it has been translated multiple times and examined as a source for the study of non-royal women’s social history, this article expands consideration to the global sphere, recognizing that the text – and its complex history – offer the opportunity to expand understanding of the gendered nature of archive making. Tracing the text from its inclusion in a mid-seventeenth-century collection of Mughal legal documents to a partial version, now at the BnF, transcribed by an eighteenth-century French Orientalist, the author deftly combines the project of historical recovery – via the consideration of how a range of historical actors understood the law and Islam – with an insightful critique of the role of male/colonial anxiety in document preservation, received analytical categories, and chronology construction. This methodological model, the author convincingly argues, invites an expanded view of women not simply as disruptors but as co-producers in archival formation.

Honorable Mentions:

Leanne Calvert, “’Came to her dressed in mans cloaths’: transgender histories and queer approaches to the family in eighteenth-century Ireland” The History of the Family, Vol. 29 No. 1, 2024.

This article presents itself as a “methodological think piece on how to queer the Irish family”. It interrogates archival documents relating to the case of alleged cross-dressing in early seventeenth century Ireland to offer a trans reading of the incident and to propose a queering of female desire. The article not only centers the story of David Campbell through a new lens but also clearly articulates the broader implications of the approach which will be of interest to scholars of Irish family history and trans historical frameworks more broadly.

Stephanie Reitzig, “Maria Sibylla Merian, Women’s Artistic Practices, and Networks of Exchange in 17th C Germany” Isis, Vol. 116 No. 2, 2025

This article focuses on how a largely overlooked network of students (and potentially collaborators) were central to Maria Sybilla Merian’s collection of insect specimens. It uses archival research and primary sources to show how Merian’s work instructing young women in art and embroidery also created a space for intellectual and material exchange that she exploited for her particular interest in natural history. The article proposes that women’s artistic activity served “network-building practices” and that this should be of interest to historians of science. As such the article effectively points to the networks that might also be established across disciplines.

Graduate Student Conference Presentation Award

Subcommitee: Kate Narveson and Jennifer L. Welsh

Winner:

Young, Olivia. “Children and Other Unnatural Vipers: Elegies for Eve’s Curse in Lucy Hutchinson’s Order and Disorder.” 72nd Annual Meeting of the Renaissance Society of America, San Francisco, CA. February 19th-21st, 2026.

Olivia Young’s work on Lucy Hutchinson’s Order and Disorder engages scholarship around Hutchinson’s views on marriage and politics, arguing that poem uses Eve’s grief to underscore the pain women experience in marriage. A close reading of Eve’s lament finds a grim view of “the lived experiences of early modern women” in marriage. The analysis moves clearly from tensions in ideas about marriage to political applications, establishing parallels between the poem’s discussion of marriage and contemporary debates about tyrannical government. Young notes that she views this conference paper as a starting point for further exploration, and her clear argument provides a solid foundation.

Honorable mention:

Chernjak, Alla. "Portrait as a Political Tool: Isabella d’Este as Virago." Paper presented at the International Conference "Early Modern Women on Politics and Ethics," University of Gothenburg, Sweden, October 5–7, 2023

Alla Chernak analyzes how to interpret the use of the masculine-gendered “Renaissance elbow” in portraits of powerful women like Isabella d’Este. Her paper provides an impressive number of examples in an ambitious presentation of Renaissance portraits and the ways in which specific poses made a statement about gender. The committee found the range of evidence impressive, although the final section about “viragos” and what the idea of “masculine women” meant within Renaissance art ends up a bit rushed. However, there is clearly a lot of material here that paves the way for future analysis and further work.

Best Article published in volume 20 of Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal

Subcommittee: Barbara Fuchs and Jennifer L. Welsh

Winner: Currie, Elspeth. “A Learned Lady? Anne Wentworth Watson and Her Latin Notebook”

Currie uses Anne Wentworth Watson’s Latin notebook to address larger questions about how modern scholars should think about “learned women” in the seventeenth century. Wentworth Watson is an atypical and elusive subject who did not engage in many of the typical composition or publication activities we associate with early modern learned women, and whose Latin was poor. In addition to a discussion of the Latin quotes transcribed and the aphorisms discussed in the notebook itself, Currie broadens the examination of Wentworth Watson’s life to include her household account books, her will, and her subscription to a major English translation and expansion of Louis Moréri’s historical dictionary later on in her life. By presenting Wentworth Watson’s life and engagement with learning through this wider lens, Currie provides a model for how we approach educated women and their lives, expanding the possibilities for future explorations of women and learning in the early modern period.

Honorable Mention: Amundsen Bergström, Matilda. “French Fashion and Swedish “Sällhet: Swedish Eighteenth-Century Intellectual Marguerite Janiçon on Sumptuary Legislation and the Economics of Happiness”

This article analyzes one of the few texts written by an eighteenth-century woman that focuses on economic legislation. In her pamphlet written in support of Swedish sumptuary laws, Maguerite Janiçon uses Enlightenment ideas about citizenship and public happiness in support of her arguments about the dangers of excessively elaborate foreign fashion for both women and men. Amundsen Bergström carefully situates the pamphlet within both the Swedish and larger European contexts of ideas about gender and society in the eighteenth century. Janiçon’s pamphlet presents women as rational beings capable of developing moral strength and protecting the natural order. Rather than being weak and easily swayed by luxury, women play a vital role as citizens whose choices regarding luxury and fashion have a significant impact on larger society and happiness. The methodological insight in this article provides a model for future work on other Enlightenment texts by women, particularly those from less-studied areas within Europe.