2.
Creative Women:
Fashioning an Identity and Community

Organizers:

Description:

This workshop explores the primary texts, both literary and visual, through which creative women sought to build community amongst themselves and an audience for their work. Through distributed readings and images (theatrical productions, dialogues, poetry, prefaces, portrait medals), we invite participants to explore the commonalities among creative women in early modern Europe, and how these commonalities fostered identity and community. Each convener offers selected readings, a brief statement on the readings, and a question aimed to open discussion in the workshop (see paragraphs below). We ask participants to come to the workshop with responses to at least two questions after reflecting on how the materials illuminate their own research and teaching.

We will open with a general statement on the organization of the workshop in which the activities of the workshop will be outlined. This will be followed by introductions of conveners and participants, offering everyone an opportunity to introduce themselves and their interests in the workshop (about 10 minutes). Following the introductions, each convener will take approximately five minutes to state what she feels is most critical for a discussion of creative women's community/ies as related to the readings (20 minutes total). We will then offer participants the opportunity to break into smaller groups. Conveners will each take a group individually or in pairs, depending on number of participants. This small group activity will allow participants to focus specifically on readings assigned by the convener(s) leading that group; in order to weave our smaller groups together, each group will spend some time considering how their small-group readings relate to questions raised by one of the other conveners/small groups. We will take about 20 minutes for this group work. The larger group will then reunite for 30 minutes to share ideas and issues raised within the smaller groups. One aim at this point will be to find commonalities among our different disciplinary approaches; we may also devote time here to methodologies for teaching these materials. The final 10 minutes will be reserved for summaries and concluding observations by the four conveners.

The material examined here allows for an investigation into the meaning of both identity and community for early modern readers and viewers, as well as for twentyfirst-century scholars. Did women see their productions as creating community for themselves distinct from or within the community of male humanists, writers, and artists? Questions we raise offer new ways of thinking about how a gendered group identity could be defined for an early modern audience through literary and visual sources.

Our interest in how creative women fashioned a sense of self and community that was effectively communicated across linguistic and political borders leads directly to discussion and understanding of women's subjectivities in the early modern period. Moreover, since the women under discussion fashioned their identities and communities both within and against predominantly male paradigms, our workshop includes issues of teaching and revising the canon within and across our disciplines.


Suggested readings:

Preliminary statements and questions offered by conveners:
Jaffe-Berg's readings provide background for the commedia dell'arte performance of "The Madness of Isabella" staged for the 1589 wedding celebrations of Ferdinando de' Medici and Christine of Lorraine. The events were orchestrated by a self-conscious Medici ruler intent on projecting his policy within a lavish and costly series of representations. At the same time, Isabella Andreini, a leading commedia dell'arte actress, used the performance as a platform through which to create a female space by employing French within the performance, thus directing her attention to the bride. Jaffe-Berg will ask participants to consider to what extent internationalism and multilingualism, implicit in Andreini's work, is a component of her self-making strategy and important to her forging of an extended community and audience for her work.

Andreini, Isabella. "The Madness of Isabella," in Flaminio Scala, Il Teatro delle favole rappresentative (1611) trans. by Henry F. Salerno in Scenarios of the Commedia dell'Arte. New York: Limelight Editions, 1996. (2 pp.)
McGill, Kathleen. "Women and Performance: The Development of Improvisation by the Sixteenth-Century Commedia dell'Arte." Theatre Journal 43/1 (March 1991): 59-61.

Larsen's readings explore Catherine des Roches's ideas about women's need to forge their own identity through learning. In des Roches's "Dialogue between Placide and Severe" from Les Secondes Oeuvres (1583), the author includes a catalogue of contemporary scholarly women. Rather than a more conventional list of women from antiquity and the Christian past, des Roches cites "famous contemporary women" such as Luisa Sigea, Cassandra Fedele, Laura Terracina, Olympia Morata, and Ippolita Torelli, to which are added the second century Proba Falconia, the legendary Clemence Isaure, and Diane de Morel, daughter of the Parisian humanist Jean de Morel. Why did des Roches select these women as exemplars? Why the emphasis on Italian women?

des Roches, Catherine. "Dialogue Between Placide and Severe," in Les Secondes Oeuvres (1583), ed. A. Larsen (Geneva, 1999). (3 1/2 pp.)
Terracina, Laura Baccio, in Women Poets of the Italian Renaissance, edited by Laura A. Stortoni, (New York, 1997), pp. 109, 111-13.

Och's readings examine sixteenth-century portrait medals of women, specifically Vittoria Colonna, poet, and Lavinia Fontana, painter. Earlier medals depict the artist, humanist or prince in his classicizing setting and garb. It was into this largely male domain that women made an appearance. As objects which stood in for a woman's actual presence, medals were vehicles for the fashioning of a community and audience, both male and female, for creative women. Scholars have been reluctant to credit women with the commission or design of their medals. Workshop participants will be asked to consider the portrait medal as evidence of ways creative women chose to present themselves to their various audiences, and how women's agency in the production of portrait medals might be considered.

Och, Marjorie. "Portrait Medals of Vittoria Colonna: Representing the Learned Woman." In Women as Sites of Culture: Women's Roles in Cultural Formation from the Renaissance to the Twentieth Century, edited by Susan Shifrin, pp. 153-63. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002. (focus on pp. 158-61)
Schaefer, Jean Owens. "A Note on the Iconography of a Medal of Lavinia Fontana." Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 47 (1984): 232-34.

Scott-Douglass's readings focus on selected prefaces to texts by Margaret Cavendish and Jane Lead. Although their lives were very different (Lead was a radical Puritan and mystic, and Cavendish was an aristocrat and natural philosopher) their prefatory rhetoric is remarkably similar: both of these seventeenth-century English writers represent themselves as women laureates, poet-prophet-philosophers; both claim to have a distinguished relationship to knowledge, personified in Cavendish's case as Nature and in Lead's case as the Virgin Wisdom; and both wrote for posterity's sake and had their texts translated and distributed on the Continent. Scott-Douglass will ask the group to consider these prefaces as responses to what is usually a male discourse.

Cavendish, Margaret. Prefatory materials to Philosophical and Physical Opinions (1655), especially "To the Reader" [the first preface], "To the Two Universities," and the frontispiece. (2 pp.)
Lead, Jane. Prefaces to The Laws of Paradise (1695), http://www.passtheword.org/Jane-Lead/. Especially "The Preface" and "The Motto." (1/2 p.)
Lead, Jane. Prefaces to Fountain of Gardens, vol. 2 (1697), especially "The Epistle of the Author" and "The Editor to the Reader." (2 pp.)