Creating Women: Notions of Femininity from 1350 to 1700

11-12 November 2005

Sponsored by the Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies Victoria College, University of Toronto

Jean-Philippe Beaulieu (Université de Montréal) "Dans l'ombre de la pucelle d'Orléans: Jeanne d'Arc comme modèle identitaire dans quelques textes polémiques du XVIIe siècle."
D'abord controversée au XVe siècle, Jeanne d'Arc est progressivement devenue, au cours des XVIe et XVIIe siècles, l'emblème univoque des intérêts de la nation française. " Femme forte " dont la mission politique contraste avec l'origine très modeste, Jeanne d'Arc semble avoir représenté, avec l'émergence de la modernité et de l'état centralisé, une figure d'exception dont les traits ont néanmoins contribué à façonner, dans l'imaginaire collectif, certaines facettes de l'identité féminine. Dans le cadre de cette communication, je me pencherai sur des textes polémiques de la première moitié du XVIIe siècle qui empruntent à Jeanne d'Arc quelques-uns de ses attributs (sa vocation politique et sa prescience d'origine divine, par exemple) pour mettre au point l'identité de locutrices fictives dont la condition modeste, loin de nuire à leur prise de parole politique, donne à celle-ci une indéniable légitimité en tant que voix du peuple. Parmi ces textes pour la plupart anonymes, on peut compter la Responce de Dame Friquette Bohëmienne (1615) et les Admirables sentiments d'une fille Villageoise (1649). La communication proposée cherchera à saisir la façon dont les auteurs de ces textes, en alignant implicitement la posture et le discours de leur personae sur l'exemple de la pucelle d'Orléans, réactivent un modèle paradoxal de femme forte, qui devient l'incarnation des intérêts supérieurs de la Nation.

Cristian Berco (Bishop's University, Québec) "The Many Faces of Female Discipline: Gender Control and Subversion in the Life of a Counter-Reformation Spanish Nun."
Orosia Bisol y Vidal, a tertiary Franciscan nun enclosed in the convent of Saint Elizabeth in Barcelona, might have led a modest life unbeknownst to the prying of modern historians were it not for a lengthy letter of self-denunciation she addressed to the inquisitors manning the Holy Office of the city in 1636. In her letter she weaved an improbable tale of a lecherous confessor, her desire to mortify the spirit, and enough sexual improprieties to make the inquisitorial notary blush in astonishment. Although her case was summarily dispatched and she was absolved ad cautelam of any wrongdoing, her tale of religiosity and sexuality gone amiss reveals the Janus-like faces of female discipline at the height of the Spanish Counter Reformation. Discipline could take many forms and in a way could be used to control a young woman like Orosia. First, there was the discipline imposed by an authority figure-her confessor who following the increasingly patriarchal models espoused in Baroque religiosity, could mould her behavior, even if ultimately to suit his lascivious needs. Perhaps more importantly though, both for her and for the system of control of which she was a part, self discipline played a key role in her subjection to prescribed gender roles and sexual mores. At a time of increasing control over the morality and sexuality of Old Christians like her, the Barcelonese inquisitors did not have to lift one finger to criminalize her behavior and shape her compliance to available sexual prescriptions. In what was an increasing phenomenon in the middle of the seventeenth century, Orosia self-policed her behavior and corrected it accordingly. In this sense, her case exemplifies the success of the Inquisition as a system increasingly shifting to control behaviour through self-discipline rather than coercion, particularly when it came to female sexuality. At the same time, Orosia's sense of discipline could turn against accepted norms and effectively subvert them. Indeed, discipline was so ingrained in her that she could readily turn to the mortification of both flesh and soul as her ultimate sign of penitence. Here, inquisitors witnessed unintended and less-than-wholesome consequences. Not only did Orosia's discipline lead to a fascination with a form of internal mortification but also to an interest in prophecy, skills and behaviours associated both with the long repressed illuminists or alumbrados and independent female mystics that roamed the countryside and Spanish cities. To make matters worse, Orosia's self-discipline also manifested itself in a manner that was most sexually inappropriate. Partly convinced by her confessor, but also moved by her own zeal of imitatio Christi, Orosia constructed discipline as mortification in a way that led to increasing sexual adventures. Thus by submitting her soul to terrible spiritual pain, she somehow managed to control her body and take it to the very places that inquisitors abhorred. Orosia's case study reveals both the strength and brittleness of female self-discipline as a system of gender control. While serving to effectively police women like this nun, the process of ingraining self-discipline-so crucial to the ideal socialization of both Protestant and Catholic women-could produce unintended spiritual and sexual consequences that in fact unraveled patriarchal structures. The control of female bodies and sexuality in Baroque Spain thus balanced uneasily between these two facets of Tridentine self-discipline.

Louise Berglund (Örebro University, Sweden) "Feminine and masculine in the images of power. A study of the changes in visual political symbolism in Sweden ca. 1350-1600."
During the later Middle Ages there appears to have been an increase in female authority in Europe. From about 1350 there was a strong increase in contemporary female saints working in conjunction with secular princes and other political leaders. This coincided with an increase in the need for communication with a wider range of the population. Popular devotion and popular participation in political life became a more marked feature in society. During the first half of the sixteenth century these conditions appear to have undergone a change. The Reformation of course sharply altered the conditions of devotion and the use of saints but these changes seem to have occurred in Catholic Europe as well. According to some scholars political and religious life was more clearly connected to patriarchal values and the feminine elements were declared heretical or otherwise unsound. The aim of my current research is to examine if there is a change in the visual political communication in Sweden during this period. Sweden experienced a strong orientation towards a symbolical acceptance of female authority as a result of the work of Saint Birgitta and her monastery foundations. During the Reformation (from approx. 1527) there was a general suppression of the cults of saints including that of Birgitta. In my paper I wish to present some examples of the visual representations of power before and after the Reformation, to relate these to visual imagery in written texts, and to discuss whether the period sees a change towards a more patriarchal definition and symbolism of power.

Renée-Claude Breitenstein (Université McGill) "Parler de femmes et faire parler des femmes: l'exemple des Femmes illustres ou les harangues héroïques des Scudéry."
Dans l'entreprise de célébration qui s'élabore sous l'Ancien Régime à travers les recueils de femmes illustres et les textes défendant la supériorité du sexe féminin, la prise de parole au " je " nécessite la mise en place de stratégies discursives de légitimation: tenu/e de répondre aux exigences doxiques, le scripteur/la scriptrice sème les éléments désamorçant le paradoxe d'un éloge portant sur un objet bas, décrié par les discours savants. Il semblerait que la construction d'un èthos irréprochable et fort n'ait pas favorisé la valorisation d'autres instances énonciatives: la délégation de la parole à des personnages est peu commune. Outre les textes relevant du genre du songe (Le Livre de la cité des dames de Christine de Pizan, Le Palais des nobles dames de Jehan du Pré, etc.), où des figures féminines personnifiant des vertus guident la disposition des arguments, les prises de parole au " je " ne surviennent guère que pour rappeler un bon mot transmis par l'histoire ajoutant au pathos d'une situation (Véturie fléchissant Coriolan ou Thomyris plongeant la tête de Cyrus dans le sang de ses ennemis). Or, Les Femmes illustres ou les harangues héroïques (1642 et 1644) des Scudéry, reprenant des épisodes et des figures notoires, distendent ces fragments jusqu'à en faire des morceaux d'éloquence complets. Qui plus est, la création, par la fiction, de voix féminines au moment où la célébration des dames s'affirme avec force (probablement encouragée en cela par la régence d'Anne d'Autriche des années 1640), réunit des conditions favorables à l'élaboration de nouveaux modèles exemplaires. Cette communication cherchera à éclairer, dans la double perspective de la tradition de célébration de la femme et de l'exercice rhétorique de la harangue, les enjeux de la prise de parole des figures féminines données à voir par les Scudéry : les " comment " et les " pourquoi " d'un " je " dont l'utilisation suggère une plus large marge de manouvre dans le façonnement des représentations féminines.

Elena Brizio (Indep. Scholar, Siena) "The Role of Women in Their Kin's Economic and Political Life: The Sienese Case from the Late 1300s to the Mid 1400s."
The history of women in the Italian Middle Age and Renaissance has been for a long time written in black and white, emphasizing the forced separation of women from civic society and highlighting excessively differences between women in different locations, for instance, between Florentine and Venetian women. As far as I can tell, Sienese women were not divided between two families, their own and that of their husbands, so that in effect they belonged to neither one. On the contrary, we can see through last wills that women were treated as worthy persons, by their own family as well as by the husbands'. Exploiting this money (and this freedom) women used in their wills all the chances given to them (or created by themselves) to benefit economically other women, mainly daughters, sisters, nieces and granddaughters but also other women, friends and acquaintances with no family ties with the woman testator. In the study of the life and activities of Sienese women, my project aims to clarify better the role of women in the economic and social strategies of their families and the impact of ties between women on the social and political lives of their kin.

Sylvia Brown (University of Alberta) "No need for Translation: Quaker Women and Cross-Cultural Contacts in the Seventeenth-Century World"
My paper will consider how Quakerism, in its earliest mid-seventeenth-century form, enabled reimaginings of gender in the context of truly global and transcultural travel by a handful of female missionaries. The best known of these are probably Katherine Evans and Sarah Cheevers, who were imprisoned by the Italian Inquisition in Malta for three years. But English female "Friends" also travelled to New England, Barbados, Ireland, and the Ottoman Empire in order to witness to the "light" for the benefit of Puritans, Catholics, and Turks. Accounts of these travels were circulated in letters to other Friends and in printed pamphlets. Often, these accounts seem genderless; indeed, an early Quaker ideal was to leave behind all trappings of "self." My paper will however argue that Quaker women missionaries do not so much leave behind gender ideology when they travel as reconfigure it in the light of encounters with ethnic or religious others. A particular feature of these encounters is an insistence on the absence of difference, to the extent that language barriers, for instance, seem invisibly and magically overcome. This insistence, I shall argue, is a symptom not of the disappearance of difference, but of its displacement and reconfiguration along routes that simultaneously enable a real expansion of what is possible for (some) women and yet also seem to lead relentlessly back to familiar and restrictive places. Thus, the former servingwoman Mary Fisher somehow finds it possible to walk 600 miles of Aegean coast in order to address the Great Sultan of the Ottoman Empire as a kind of equal. Yet accounts of her meeting, including her own, persistently read it in the gendered terms of romance.

Mauro Carboni (Università di Bologna) "Capitalizing on Women: Patrician Alliances in Early Modern Bologna."
The subject of this essay is the relationship between marriage alliances and political leadership in early modern Bologna. It will be argued that the success of a small group of lineages in establishing and maintaining an informal primacy within the élite itself rested on the ability to project preeminence by capitalizing on women through marriage, rather than marginalizing them through monachization. In contrast to urban aristocracies' prevailing practices - in an age dominated by primogeniture, by restricted marriages and by entailment strategies - Bolognese key houses were remarkable in choosing to sustain their long term agnatic interest and strategies by supporting, instead of limiting, their women's marriages.

Elizabeth S. Cohen (York University) "Prostitute Voices from Roman Trials, c.1600."
Using prostitutes' testimonies from Roman criminal trials from the beginning of the seventeenth century, this paper tackles the problem of reading 'tone of voice' in written documents. As I have argued elsewhere concerning young women interrogated by the Governor's Court, depositions, while strongly shaped by the legal context, also may offer crafted self-representations. When prostitutes speak about their profession and their selves, I see a variety of rhetorical strategies, including shame-tinged omission, matter-of-fact self-assertion, and even unironic protestations of purity and innocence. Are these contradictory modes mere posturing for the moment or may they sometimes correspond to some -- complicated -- sense of identity?

Jane Couchman (Glendon College, York University) "Models for Huguenot Noblewomen in Their Letters."
It has long been recognized that Huguenot noble women were central to the establishment of the Reformed Church in France. In this paper I will explore notions of femininity, of appropriate feminine behaviour, developed by and for Huguenot noblewomen in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. The locus of their identity was, not surprisingly, considered to be their home and their family. Less obviously, but just as importantly, many of them developed a political persona as well, becoming " femmes d'état ", and contributing significantly to the struggles of Huguenots against Catholics in France and in the Netherlands. Evelyne Berriot-Salvadore has written that, though there is no conduct manual specifically addressed to Huguenot women, the Epistre d'une demoiselle française . sur la mort d'excellente et vertueuse Dame, Leonor de Roye . (s.l., 1564), with its " miroir d'une vie exemplaire ", provides a model for Huguenot girls (Les Femmes dans la Société française de la Renaissance, 63). Eléonore de Roye is depicted as a loyal spouse, a devoted mother, and, above all, a fervent believer in the Reformed faith. As described by her admiring woman friend, Eléonore's final hours were filled with loving admonitions to her family and with prayers and meditations which form a kind of Huguenot " art of dying ". This is perhaps the image we would expect for late-16th and early-17th century upper-class Huguenot women, " angels in the house " and carriers of the faith. This account of Eléonore de Roye's life and death omits, however, the very important political activities in which Eléonore and her mother engaged, especially between 1560 and 1563, in support of her husband the Duc de Condé during the first of the French Civil Wars. Twice while Condé was a prisoner of the ultra-Catholic Guise family, his mother-in-law and his wife systematically reinforced his alliances with Protestant German princes and with Elizabeth I of England. Armed with this support, Eléonore negotiated by letter and directly with the Regent, Catherine de Médicis; the outcome was the Peace of Amboise and her husband's release. The correspondences of Eléonore de Roye, Charlotte de Bourbon, Louise de Coligny and Elizabeth de Bouillon allow us to observe the identity-formation of three generations of Hugenot noblewomen within their homes and immediate families and also as active participants in the wider political and religious conflicts.

Julia K. Dabbs (University of Minnesota, Morris) "Martyred for Art: The Death-Stories of Women Artists, 1500-1750."
Female visual artists were among the first creative women to be incorporated in collective biographical compendia in the early modern period, where their lives played out side by side those of their male colleagues, makingcomparisons inevitable. In this paper I intend to focus on a crucial aspect of the life-story, yet one that has been overlooked in the limited research on women artists' biographies, and that is, ironically, the death narrative (or "death-story"). The account of how an individual died was seen in the early modern period as a virtual summa of that person's life, especially in regards to their character, yet this importance was heightened in the case of an early demise. As in any time period, there was a need to explain why the premature death occured, and whether it could have been prevented in some way. Beginning with Giorgio Vasari's Lives of the Painters, Sculptors, and Architects (1550/1568), the early deaths of male artists such as Raphael, Giorgione, and Correggio are somewhat surprisingly attributed to their immoderate behavior, such as having an illicit lover, or being miserly. This thematic pattern is not, however, evidenced in the death-stories of young female artists, who instead are virtually canonized by their male biographers for their virtuous moral qualities. Yet a negative side is also witnessed in this hagiographical model, for in the cases of Irene di Spilimbergo (1538-1559), Annella de' Rosa (1602-1649), Anna Waser (1679-1713), and other women artists, their gender-transgressive choice of profession is subtly blamed for their untimely deaths, making them truly "martyrs" for art. Visual evidence in the form of posthumous portraits of these same artists will also be offered as confirmation that even in death, gender stereotypes affected the historical representation of the female artist.

Patricia Demers (University of Alberta) "Early Modern Englishwomen's Miserere: From Penitence to Expression."
Conventionally associated with the remorse of King David for his dalliance with Bathsheba, the Penitential psalms (Pss. 6, 32, 38, 51, 102, 130, 143) were widely adapted meditative texts in early modern England. Bishop John Fisher wrote a treatise, The seven penytentcyall psalmes (1508), and Sir Thomas Wyatt translated them. Englishwomen's responses to the Penitentials, however, are less well-known. Lady Grace Mildmay admitted in her Autobiography (c. 1617-20) that she read them daily, while Elizabeth Grymeston's Miscelanea (1604) included odes in imitation. I propose to examine Englishwomen's adaptations of what is arguably the most famous Penitential, Psalm 51 (Ps. 50 in the Vulgate), known as the "Miserere" because of its first word and overall emphasis. Tracing the ways early modern women-commoners, aristocrats, and royalty-warmed to the biblical pericopes of sin and salvation as echoes of their own struggles toward literary expression and voice should provide a previously unmapped route to understand their sense of themselves and the expressly social craft of writing. By attending to Princess Elizabeth's translation The Glass of the Sinful Soul (1544), Lady Jane Grey Dudley's prayers and recitation before her execution in 1554, Anne Vaughan Lock's sonnet sequence (1560), and the Countess of Pembroke's remarkable metaphrase (c. 1595), I plan to investigate if their tropes of fallibility and yearning convey an identifiably gendered sense of transgression and purgation, contrition and transformation.

Diane Desrosiers-Bonin (Université McGill) "Travestissement de la parole feminine dans l'oeuvre de Suzanne de Nerveze."
Les premières années de la Fronde ont donné lieu à un floraison d'écrits polémiques; " il n'est pas mesme jusque des femmes qui ne s'en meslent ", remarque le bibliothécaire du cardinal de Mazarin, Gabriel Naudé (Mascurat, p. 8). Au nombre de ces libellistes féminines pour la plupart méconnues, figure Suzanne de Nervèze qui a beaucoup écrit, mais dont les ouvres n'ont pas connu d'éditions modernes ni suscité l'intérêt des critiques. Elle a pourtant publié plus d'une trentaine de textes ressortissant à des genres rhétoriques diversifiés: discours encomiastiques, épîtres exhortatoires, lettres de consolation, etc. Dans ses écrits politiques, Suzanne de Nervèze recourt à divers personnages féminins fictifs pour assurer une légitimé à sa prise de parole publique. Elle fait ainsi parler à la première personne une religieuse, une bourgeoise et une noble, en tirant profit des attributs liés à l'identité de ces femmes. À travers les modulations particulières de leurs voix, se fait donc entendre sur la scène politique française, théâtre des affrontements de la Fronde, une parole féminine chargée de revendications.

Francesco Divenuto (Università degli Studi "Federico II", Naples, Italy) "The Role Queen Amalia of Saxony in the Planning of the Royal Palace of Caserta."
By examing the writings of Luigi Vanvitelli (1700-1773), the Italian architect, engineer and painter, who was entrustusted by Charles III of Bourbon to build, among other important palaces, the Royal Palace of Caserta, this paper aims to examine the role of Queen Maria Amalia of Saxony, wife of Chalers III of Bourbon, granddaughter of August II, king of Poland, in the planning of the royal palace of Caserta. Queen Maria Amalia is a central figure in the XVIII century in Naples. She was instrumental, for instance, in founding the Royal Factory of Capodimonte porcelain.

Brenda Hosington (Université de Montréal) "Notions of Femininity in Paratexts Accompanying Englishwomen's Translations, 1524-1600."
In the period between 1524 and 1600, ten Englishwomen produced fifteen translations that were accompanied by prefaces, dedications, and epistles to the reader. Some of these were written by the translators themselves, others were by male editors. They contain the traditional modesty topoi used by all translators in the period but they also address questions of gender. On the one hand, some of the female translators give vent to feelings of insecurity and frustration (and in one case, anger) yet also express pride, independence and the conviction that however modest, their translations contribute to the literary and religious culture of their time. On the other, the various male editors reveal attitudes towards women in general, and learned women in particular, belief in the power of translation to promote female virtue, and a curious mix of praise and condescension. These prefatory materials demonstrate in a variety of images the traditional hierarchal relationship of author/translator and source text/target text but, of more consequence for this paper, they reveal both female and male notions of femininity in sixteenth-century England.

Lynn M. Laufenberg (Sweet Briar College, VA) "Adultresses, Poisoners, and Witches? Female 'Criminality' in Early Renaissance Florence."
This paper presents a profile of "female criminality" in late fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Florence, as it emerges from an analysis of approximately 2,500 sentences sampled from criminal cases involving female defendants that were tried in the tribunal of the city's chief judicial magistrate, the Podesta`. It suggests that the offenses often identified by both modern scholars and early modern jurists as quintessentially "female" crimes (adultery, infanticide, poisoning, and witchcraft) actually constituted, statistically, only a minority of prosecutible offenses that were commmitted by women. In fact, "typical female" criminility far more greatly resembled typical "male" criminality. The vast majority of criminal prosecutions against female defendants (as against male defendants) were brought for assault and battery, insult, theft, trespass, and failure to appear to testify. The paper also compares its findings with those presented in recent studies of women and criminal behavior in early modern Europe, in order to offer preliminary conclusions about how closely the Florentine situation corresponded to, or deviated from, patterns and conceptions of gendered criminality in the broader European context.

Maritere López (California State University, Fresno) "Wife Material: A Courtesan's Self Redefined."
Through the examination of personal letters written between 1515 and 1517, this paper investigates a renowned sixteenth-century courtesan, Camilla Pisana, and her attempts to redefine her self in an effort to raise her position within her lover's social milieu. Pisana found unacceptable her relationship with Filippo Strozzi (1489-1538), for he continually denigrated her avowed love for and faithfulness to him. Central to her redefinition was therefore the downplaying of her venality, a strategy commonly attributed to courtesans by modern scholarship. However, in contrast to other courtesans, most notably Veronica Franco, Pisana did not re-characterize herself as a woman of letters. Rather than seeking public acclaim, and thus a place in the traditionally male sphere, Pisana stressed instead her "wifely" attributes, such as her managerial abilities and commitment to the protection of Strozzi's name. The choice of such a conventional role, I propose, illuminates the degree to which Pisana's self-fashioning was not necessarily a transgressive act, but rather a reiteration of accepted notions of femininity.

Sanda Munjic (University of Toronto) "The Shrew Untamed: An Alternative Femininity in María de Zayas."
In her Desengaños amorosos, the seventeenth century Spanish author María de Zayas offers representations of female identity that alternate between the stereotypical patriarchal constructs of femininity in amorous literature (beautiful and distant), hagiographic literature (a martyr), Christian prescriptive literature (selfless, motherly) and her own literature, where vengeful women - if not murderous themselves - serve as catalysts for murder. Not even in this last case does Zayas lack patriarchal textual precedents, even more gruesome in depictions of female cruelty than her own stories. Thus Ovid describes the horde of Thracian women who, alone of all creation unmoved by Orpheus's song, kill the musician. In Juan de Flores's sentimental novel, Grisel y Mirabella, another horde of women kills and consumes the misogynous Torrellas. In more than one way hence - because patriarchy has formulated categorical but mutually exclusive conceptualizations of women - female identity can be constructed only as conditioned by the patriarchal norm, in response to it, or as a re-working of the patriarchal norm. In this paper, I will address how Zayas navigates patriarchal notions of the feminine in order to construct through violence an alternative femininity that challenges gender positions and relations, as two of the elements that play in the formulation of gender identity.

Cristina Perissinotto (University of Ottawa) "The Bun and the Oven: Women in Italian Utopias of the Renaissance."
Thomas More's Utopia generated in Italy a plethora of treatises that could loosely be defined as "utopian." Some of the more widely known works in this area include Mambrino Roseo's Repubblica dei Garamanti, Anton Francesco Doni's Mondo savio e pazzo, Francesco Patrizi's Città felice and Ludovico Agostini's Repubblica immaginaria. These works greatly influenced Tommaso Campanella, whose celebrated Città del sole was published at the beginning of the seventeenth century. While there is excellent scholarship dedicated to women in later utopias, especially in the area of Anglo-American studies, there has been little feminist research pertaining to ideal societies of the Renaissance, particularly in Italy. My paper focuses on notions of femininity in these political and literary treatises written in Italy during the Renaissance. What were the roles reserved to women in Italian treatises inspired by Thomas More's Utopia? Were Renaissance utopias any place for women? If a utopia is to be interpreted as a better place for humanity, should this not include women? Conversely, does a place that creates better conditions for men but not for women qualify as a utopia? I find that some of these questions are best answered using the idea of alterity as a working hypothesis. Since utopian societies were generally isolated, homogeneous communities with very few extraneous elements, women were often treated as the only "other," marginal social individuals whose status was not even addressed in the utopian project. The fact that women were not named in utopias does not mean, according to feminist scholarship, that that they were taken into account "by default," because "general-seeming linguistic and cultural formations typically encode maleness and their subject and norm." (Janel Mueller, "The Whole Island like a Single Family. Positioning Women in Utopian patriarchy" Peter C. Herman, Rethinking the Henrician Era (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994. 97.) Women's role in reproduction and in the management of the household nonetheless was crucial if the utopias had to operate properly and survive their first generation. Also, the reduction of working hours and the requirement that every member worked for a few hours each day made women's contribution to utopian societies essential. Women's very "otherness" was therefore essential to the functioning of the utopian community, yet the specific tasks performed by women remain virtually unmentioned in utopian narratives. The goal of my paper is to show how women were constructed as "the other" in Renaissance utopias, and to explore the implications of their assigned roles in imaginary societies of the Italian Renaissance.

Anne Lake Prescott (Barnard College, NY) "Feminine Impressions: Presenting Women Writers in Seventeenth-Century Print."
In recent years, often with the hopes of edging us away from seeing texts as idealized creations by individual capital-A Authors, some scholars have examined early modern books as material objects with a specific cultural/political context. It is in such terms that the 1616 folio edition of Ben Jonson's Works has been studied, as have quartos by Shakespeare and other male playwrights. Several years ago Leah Chang read a fine paper doing the same for early editions of Helisenne de Crenne, and modern feminist critics have argued that the posthumous edition of Katherine Phillips presents her as a good girl of whom any patriarch would approve, thus erasing much of her somewhat subversive originality (on this see the forthcoming facsimile edition edited by Paula Loscocco for Ashgate). There has been much less scholarship on lesser known women, however, if only because some of them have reappeared in print so recently. I cannot pretend to have been a major participant in this scholarly enterprise, although I have an essay forthcoming on English editions of the Heptaméron, and I am at the moment working on a talk for the next RSA conference that will examine the shifting presentation in print of Marguerite de Valois' memoirs as it went through a dozen or so English editions (the texts tend to remain the same but the title-pages and introductions shift with the political weather as we go from 1641 to 1664). As co-editor of the Ashgate series of facsimile editions of early modern women writers, I have been intrigued by the physical presentation of the often minor, even minimal, poets whose works we reproduce. So far as I know, most of them have been beneath the notice of scholars interested in the material history of early modern books and publishing. It would be interesting, then, to take a look not so much at the contents (although a few sentences on that would be helpful and maybe necessary) but at the title-pages, introductions, and so forth of a sample of these volumes. The paratexts, especially the preliminary matter, sometimes includes the women's own rhetorical maneuvers in defense of themselves as women writers, my favorite example being the astrologer Sarah Jinner's vigorous defense of women writers, a defense that tells doubters to remember Queen Elizabeth and Katherine Phillips. In my talk I would discuss the presentation by the various printers and the self-presentation, when visible, in books by such writers as Alicia D'Anvers, who wrote a long and not very respectful poem about Oxford University, or Elizabeth Rowe ("Philomela," says the title page) with its cagey preface by another woman. If there is time, I'd like to say a few words about the first edition of Anne Killigrew: she is at least semi-canonical, but the title-page and introductory poem make interesting reading. It will be impossible to ignore Sarah Jinner and another female astrologer, Mary Holden. The latter appears on one title page with pretty breasts, nipples looking alert, and on another with the promise of a method for testing virginity, doubtless a culturally useful technique but better suiting books by midwives or gynecologists. Are there other gender differences between what is presented to us on the title pages and in the paratexts of books by minor early modern women writers and those in books by their male equivalents? If this proposal is accepted I will start getting together some materials to hand out. I should confess that most of the books are late in the early modern period, largely because works by women increased dramatically as the seventeenth-century went on. That is why I am calling them "early modern," not "Renaissance." The texts I would work with are only a small sample of what is available, but they will help me suggest that as cultural artifacts such books repay study.

Bridgette Sheridan (Brandeis University, MA) "From a Masculinized Femininity to the Subordinate Female: Changing Conceptions of Midwives' Roles in Seventeenth-Century France"
This paper explores changing conceptions of the roles and the position of midwives in the seventeenth-century French medical community by comparing birthing manuals written by two French midwives, Louise Bourgeois (1563-1636) and Marguerite du Tertre de la Marche (1638-1706). The French royal midwife Louise Bourgeois, midwife to Queen Marie de Médicis and many aristocratic and bourgeois Parisian women, was the author of several published works, including a three-volume manual on midwifery, Observations diverses sur la sterilité, perte de fruict, foecondité, accouchements, et maladies des femmes, & enfants nouveaux naiz, amplement traittées, et heuresement praticquées par L. Bourgeois dite Boursier (1609-1626). Marguerite du Tertre de la Marche was the chief midwife and instructor at the Hôtel-Dieu in Paris from 1670 to 1686. She published her midwife's manual, Instruction Familiere et Utile aux Sages-Femmes Pour Bien Pratiquer Les Accouchemens, Faite par Demandes & Réponses, in 1677. Galenic medical theory informed attitudes and beliefs concerning gender roles-and by implication the roles of physicians, surgeons, and midwives-in seventeenth century society. In addition, as both Bourgeois's and De la Marche's writings demonstrate, attitudes concerning gender roles were shaped by contemporary political and social debates and events in France. In the early seventeenth century, Louise Bourgeois was an active participant in discussions about the role of midwives in birthing and medicine. In her view, newly-fashioned midwives such as herself would embody both traditional notions of femininity and masculinity so that there would be no need for men in the birthing room. Bourgeois imagined that midwives would necessarily be incorporated into the medical hierarchy-a masculinized femininity if you will. Rather than women's bodies being controlled and defined by men, women would have a central role in interpreting the female body in the public realm. Nonetheless, by the time that Marguerite du Tertre de la Marche published her manual, attitudes toward midwives and their role in caring for women had already begun to change. A school for midwives at the Hôtel-Dieu had been established, and midwives who wanted to practice in Paris or the surrounding suburbs were trained and licensed there. In 1638, the Office des Accouchées at the Paris Hôtel-Dieu had established the rule that a surgeon should be present at all deliveries. De la Marche wrote her manual in order to educate young midwives-in-training and to prepare them for their licensing exams. While midwives were still involved in training other midwives, an examination of De la Marche's writing shows that midwives of her time clearly worked under physicians' and surgeons' watchful eyes. While Bourgeois wanted midwives to be independent practitioners, De la Marche viewed midwives as subordinate to both the French state and the medical profession. A comparison of Louise Bourgeois's and Marguerite du Tertre de La Marche's midwifery manuals provides insight into the ways in which midwives were effectively rendered marginal to the medical hierarchy, and midwifery became the ground on which physicians and surgeons vied for professional territory and supremacy in early modern France.

Jamie Smith (University of Toronto) "Woman as Substitute: The Legal Construction of Women in Fifteenth-Century Genoa."
Christiane Klapish-Zuber and Thomas Kuehn have illuminated the plight of women in early modern Florence. Their brilliant work has shaped the way early modern scholars do Italian women's history. But Florence is not Italy, nor is it representative of Italy. As Stanley Chojnacki has shown for Venice, women in other parts of Italy had different experiences. This is certainly the case for Genoa. Whereas a woman could not stand in court in Florence, she could in Genoa. When governing her own affairs, she appears to have had complete control. Moreover, she was treated as her husband's equal when she was his replacement while he was away from the commune. This paper will examine the provisions laid out in the statutes of Genoa that create the legal context for Genoese women as well as the notarial records that bear them out. Both the laws and notarial records reflect a dynamic society where women played a much larger role than assumed by considering only the Florentine example. The idea of woman, as found in Genoese laws, is not one of complete subjugation. Although she was subject to the patria potestas, within that framework, she had agency. Moreover, if her husband left the commune, the court treated her as if she were her husband. In judicial proceedings, the court had to notify the defendant that a claim had been made against him. But, citing his wife was considered the same as citing him. She was expected to stand for him or appoint someone else to represent him. If Genoese women could act as substitutes for their men, what does this say about the status of these women? Does the Genoese example force us to reconsider the role of women in the early modern commune? Perhaps the Florentine law obscures how active Florentine women were if we look at the duties and responsibilities of Genoese women. Or, perhaps the two are truly different and each reflect the divergent notions of women held by early modern people.

Lyndan Warner (Saint Mary's University, Halifax, NS) "Creating Women: The Early Modern Stepmother."
This paper will explore the image of the stepmother in the period from 1350 to 1700. In recent decades, we have learned much about early modern maternity, childrearing and motherhood, but we know very little about the mother who was not quite a mother. In early modern France roughly 20% to 30% of all marriages involved a second marriage or a remarriage for one of the spouses. Across Europe, widowers were more likely to remarry and with a shorter interval between marriages than remarrying widows. The stepmother was a common figure in the early modern past, but has been rarely mentioned in recent scholarship. In French the term marastre, often described the stepmother in a pejorative sense and contrasted the treatment one might expect from a stepmother with the care or affection of a mother. While the primary sources for this paper will be drawn from French literature, family papers and legal cases, I will attempt to draw some comparisons with the figure of the stepmother across Europe

Dana Wessell (University of Toronto) "Honour and Shame: The Construction of Women's Bodies in Medieval Spanish Law Codes."
In the Middle Ages, conceptions of women's bodies were constructed in texts by various kinds of scholars based on dominant medical, religious and social views. These ideas permeated all aspects of society, including the law which used these constructions to emphasize the need to protect women; both from society and themselves. Law codes from medieval Spain clearly demonstrate the link between legal concerns about protecting women and the medical/religious emphasis on women as weaker vessels. But medieval Spanish concerns about protecting women's bodies had little to do with women themselves but rather reflected male honour and status. For the protection of women was the responsibility of male family members whose own honour and status would be maligned if they failed to do so. Using legal codes from medieval Spain, this paper will examine the link between marriage, procreation, women's bodies and social honour. In doing so, it will argue that the protection of women's bodies by the law allowed them to fulfill the socially defined roles of wife and mother which enhanced the honour and social status of their male relatives. In this manner, law codes from medieval Spain constructed women's bodies as sites of sexuality

Deanne Williams (York University) "Elizabeth I: Size Matters"
This paper examines the interaction between the diminutive and the magnificent in historical accounts of Queen Elizabeth and in portraits of Elizabeth. It places an overwhelming concern with size, and its predominant artistic mode of the monumental, the decorated, the magnificent, in dialogue with the fragmentary, the trifling, and the occasional. The interaction and dialogue between the great and the small constitutes, I argue, an ongoing conversation concerning Elizabeth's sovereignty as well as England's nationhood: a conversation that is reflected in cultural forms such as the sonnet sequence and the miniature as English culture, as a whole, performed Elizabeth. For example, while many regard the sonnet, and the miniature, as quintessential Elizabethan forms, we may consider them not only as (to use an Elizabethan term) "toys," but also as parts which gesture toward an imposing whole: the individual sonnet takes its place within a sequence that, as the period continues, becomes more expansive and inclusive; the miniature is a reminder of the life-size, often indicating an emotional relationship that is, indeed, larger than life. A response to Elizabeth's gender, and shaping an evolving conception of girlhood, this Elizabethan aesthetic provides the iconic and imaginative formulations of empire that was eventually realized in geographical terms.

Ilana Zinguer (Haifa University, Israel) "Le discours médical entre le discours philosophique et le discours identitaire féminin"
Le cas célèbre de Marie/Marin Le Marcis (1601) a fait l'objet d'études médicales très circonstanciées de la part du médecin Jacques Duval à l'occasion du procès dans lequel il était impliqué personnellement comme médecin principal. Cette étude donne lieu, après un procès célèbre, à des réponses médicales de la part d'autres médecins dont Riolan. Le discours non médical n'était d'ailleurs pas indifférent au problème des hermaphrodites si nous rappelons le cas de Marie Germain dont Montaigne parle dans son essai 1,21 De l'imagination et dans son Journal de Voyage en Italie. Il se rappellera des Monstres et Prodiges d' Ambroise Paré. Comment allier le discours médical au discours philosophique et au discours identitaire féminin du début du XVIIe siècle. Notre étude s'attachera à montrer l'importance décisive du discours médical dans ce domaine.