Program Overview

What roles did women play in the conflicts and negotiations of the early modern world? How did gender shape women's agency in times of war, religious strife, and economic change? How were conflict and concord gendered in art, histories, literature, music, and political, legal, didactic and religious treatises? We will consider these issues in relationship to the following topics:

Negotiations

This plenary focuses on women as negotiators: in war and peace, in regional and territorial disputes, in colonial encounters, in domestic affairs, financial matters, and mercantile arrangements, in religious conflicts, and cultural debates.

How were women represented as negotiators in art, history, literature, and music? Was women’s exercise of power gendered? How do we know? How did women negotiate the tensions between their individual agency and their legal subordination to king, father, or husband? How are the representations of powerful women inflected by class?

Economies

This plenary emphasizes the conflicts and resolutions that accompanied the gendering of early modern economic relations. Participants will consider women as economic agents and as objects of commerce in cottages, in villages, in urban centers, across regions, borders, and the seas. Participants will also consider women's roles in supporting or opposing national and international wars materially and will examine women's experiences in negotiations involving family money, finances, lands, and estates.

How were gender and class implicated in economic change? What economic powers did religion offer women? Which professions were typically female? How did women’s bodies figure in commerce? What conflicts centered on familial and household economies? What financial support did women offer in wartime? How did women function as agents in the patronage system? How were women involved as daughters, heiresses, litigants, wives, and widows in conflicts over family inheritance, family lands, and estates?

Faiths and Spiritualities

This plenary considers the extent to which gender was a factor in migration and proselytizing, and in the wars, persecution, and religious colonizing and conversion that marked the early modern period around the world.

How do gender and religion map onto voyages of trade, exploration, or imperialism? How were women, as individuals and as members of political or family networks, instrumental in transmitting, promoting, and supporting--or in thwarting--different religions during times of religious crises? How were those accorded spiritual status (mystics, healers, heretics, witches, shamans, and others) gendered? What part did gender play in forms of devotional expressions found both within and outside religious institutional structures? How did such rituals and practices play out across world religions? How did these concerns engage early modern literary, musical, and visual cultures?

Pedagogies

This plenary explores the conflicts prompted by teaching about early modern women.

Where are the points of conflict and concord in the classroom and in the scholarly world? How do we defend the teaching of early modern women's lives and works? Is there a feminist pedagogy for the teaching of early modern women? When we teach about early modern homosocial and homoerotic relationships, pornography, and broader issues of gender and sexuality, how do we understand and respond to the discomfort these subjects sometimes raise in our students? How do we negotiate institutional conflicts with skeptical students, departments, administrators, and publishers? How do we deal with strategies to devalue women's production, such as debates about female authorship? What do we do when an early modern female writer may not be, in fact, the true author?

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This symposium extends the work of five earlier symposia sponsored by the Center for Renaissance & Baroque Studies in 1990, 1994, 1997, 2000, 2003, and 2006. Plenary sessions are followed by thematically related workshops designed to encourage discussion and foster new research.