Workshops: Pedagogy

Workshop 33: Narrative Fragments:
Academic Reconstructions of Early Modern Womens Stories

Conveners:

• Sheila Cavanagh, English, Emory University
• Pamela McVay, History, Ursuline College

This workshop, to be convened by an historian and a literary scholar, considered the challenges facing scholars as they interpret disparate documents that tell stories of early modern women’s lives. The workshop conveners presented stories by and about two "transgressive" seventeenth-century women: the author Lady Mary Wroth and a convict, Anna Maria Langh. What can we know of these women from their writing and testimony? Can we or should we attempt to separate their stories from the societal expectations that shaped them? What questions do your own sources force you to examine when you attempt to reconstruct women's narratives? Workshop participants received excerpts from Wroth’s Urania and Langh’s court documents before the conference, along with descriptions of some of the questions the texts provoke. At the workshop we considered the pitfalls of constructing "stories" and of drawing conclusions from such documents. Participants were encouraged to bring examples of their own archival research or other germane texts.