Workshops: Pedagogy

Workshop 34: Sex, Lies, and Inscrutability: Reading and Reconstructing Narratives of Female Behavior in
Early Modern England and France

Conveners:

• Richelle Munkhoff, English, University of Southern Mississippi
• Kathleen Suchenski, French, Augustana College
• Cristine Varholy, English, University of Wisconsin, Madison

This workshop was designed to generate discussion about practices of interpretation by focusing on inscrutable figures and moments in texts, specifically depictions of female behavior that resist easy classification and/or explanation. How we approach such inscrutable moments has important implications for pedagogical and scholarly practice, since informed interpretation of such moments requires an accurate understanding of contemporary relationships, concepts, customs and material conditions -- topics rendered somewhat inscrutable by their historical distance. We considered a brief series of literary and historical examples that demonstrate both the impetus to, and difficulties of, constructing explanatory narratives to account for the behavior of female characters in early modern texts and to account for the actual circumstances of early modern women. We anticipated that discussion of these examples would lead to a consideration of more general issues of literary and historical practice and would elicit examples of related interpretive problems from scholars of other disciplines and cultures. We hoped to generate discussion about strategies for presenting such interpretations with authority and yet acknowledging their constructed nature. Such a discussion has particular relevance for scholars and teachers of early modern women, who often focus on the recovery of previously inscrutable figures and narratives.