Constructing a City of Ladies

Early modern women writes searched for a tradition and a community. Theirs was not so much anxiety of influence as the anxiety of absence, as I observed in 1985, an absence that I felt myself, as did many others working in this field (Silent 1). Our writing was often no more valued than that of women we studied, giving us a sense of solidarity with them. Parallels between women we studied and our own situation are evident in Jean R. Brink's 1980 introduction to Female Scholars: Learned women, conscious of being exceptions, made every effort to establish contacts with contemporary women who lived in other countries and also to study work of their predecessors regardless of nationality (p. 1). More an angle of vision than a single methodology, study of early modern women requires interdisciplinary, cooperative scholarship across national boundaries. Our focus has widened as we have looked beyond Europe and as we have discovered a multiplicity of hitherto overlooked texts and material objects, such as wills and other legal documents, diaries, personal and business correspondence, medical receipts, advice books, religious meditations, musical compositions, paintings, architecture, monuments, and needlework. At symposium on Attending to Women in Renaissance England, sponsored by Center for Renaissance and Baroque Studies at University of Maryland (1990), I was at first exhilarated and then utterly overwhelmed by avalanche of new materials on women writers, artists, musicians, theologians, politicians, and scientists--not just aristocratic women, my own primary focus of study, but women of all social ranks. I was beginning to despair, realizing that I could never master all these new discoveries, when I had a moment of epiphany--no one person needs to know it all. The field is being shaped by an international community of scholars who now use a wide array of critical methodologies to study early modern women of all races and nationalities. Each of us brings different stones to building, but together we are, like Christine de Pisan, shaping a City of Ladies. My comments, therefore, will be drawn primarily from my own field of English literature, with occasional glances at other locales and disciplines, as I consider two related questions: How did early modern women find communities that empowered their work, and how do we? My attempt to answer these questions has become a parallel search for networks of early modern women and networks of contemporary scholars. By asking about early modern women, we raise questions of what we mean by historical research. How close can we come to reconstructing their lives and putting their achievements in context? How much are we blinded by our own position? When we read proscriptions for women, can we be certain how they were read and to what extent they were followed by typical women of time? We have access to cultural ideal through advice books, homilies, and even funeral sermons for women who were praised for conforming to ideal. But specific women who have left records tend to be exceptional--those whose violation of standards is recorded in legal records, or those whose social rank gave them prominence, or those who made a significant achievement in arts or in politics. We know that some women were an important part of political community. For aristocratic women, court and country house served as primary foci for women to meet together. In sixteenth century, an age of queens, these female conversations had unprecedented political import when Marguerite de Navarre and her daughter Jeanne d'Albret, Catherine de'Medici, Mary Tudor, Mary Stuart, and Elizabeth Tudor acted on public stage. While non-royal women were still barred from formal power structures, women close to a queen wielded considerable informal power, as indicated by assiduity with which their favor was courted by male courtiers and ambassadors. …