Women's Voices, the Early Modern

King Margaret L. "Women's Voices, the Early Modern, and the Civilization of the West," \

in Shakespeare Studies, v25 (1997), 21.

Abstract:

Early modern women's studies is the scholarly examination of the literary female voice, appearing in many forms from 1350-1750. These dates mark the beginning of Western womens' assertion that they have the right to define themselves by speaking. This field has the interdisciplinary quality shared by investigations into the Renaissance, the Scientific Revolution, and the Enlightenment.

Is there such a field as "Early Modern Women"? Absolutely. It is an interdisciplinary field of study comparable to that of the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Scientific Revolution, or the Enlightenment. All of these are interdisciplinary fields, involving professionals from traditional history, literature, arts, philosophy, religious disciplines (defined by methodology), or departments (defined by institution). In each case, some kind of movement or phenomenon is the object of everyone's interest: the impact of the classical tradition, or of the creation of new churches, or the reconceptualization of the cosmos, or the realignment of intellectual culture according to secular norms and concerns. In the case of the study of early modern women (my dating is 1350-1750), the phenomenon that is studied from an array of disciplinary perspectives is the clear articulation, for the first time in history and anywhere on the globe, of women's voices, the female voice.

I hear the objections already. Surely there were women who spoke up before: medieval mystics, Jewish prophets, Egyptian queens, not to mention Japanese, Chinese, and Indian poets and novelists. And what about women who asserted themselves by doing, even if they had no literary voice? All of this is granted. But the early modern phenomenon is a movement, something tangible. In this period, many women in many languages and from many social vantage points claim that women, generally, may participate in the mainstream, male-dominated, intellectual culture of the age. They not only speak, but they assert their right to speak and define themselves by speaking. It is the age of the emergence of the female voice--previously unheard, and not since, as some lament, silenced.

It is not, on the other hand, the age of the liberation of women from traditional social roles. The definitions of women's roles were remarkably tenacious and held most women in bondage through 1800 and beyond. In many arenas, women of early modern Europe could be said to lose ground--in religious organizations, in the realm of work, within the family. Where they make unique progress is on the ideological plane. The early modern phenomenon of the emergence of the female voice, of women's claim to participation in culture, is not just a transitional stage in the movement from medieval to modern Europe. It is a thing in itself.

Is there a discipline specific to the study of early modern women? No, I think not. Women's presence and absence on the early modern stage can be studied using the same tools used to study the texts, documents, and objects that enable us to understand the experience of early modern men, or war, or theology, or physics.

Some adjustments must be made, of course. The documents may be harder to find because the documentary record is suited to a male-dominated world, recording mercantile contracts, or judicial investigations, or guild constitutions, that pertain mostly to male lifestyles. But scholars have learned to read the documents from a different perspective, to elicit from them what is said--sometimes because nothing at all is said--about women.

The objects, too, are different. The scholar must turn away from the grand monuments: the palaces, cathedrals, fortifications, and most of the painted and sculpted works of art. To understand women, it is necessary to look at the objects most associated with them: textiles, above all, spun, woven, sewn, embroidered by female hands; their boxes, books, and toys; the beds, chairs, stools, and buckets associated with cooking, laundering, and giving birth; the rooms in which they sat to spin, sew, weave, embroider, cook, and talk.

The texts--the consciously composed literary texts by and about women--are suddenly rich in the early modern period. They are written in the same languages and, generally speaking, according to the same formats that works by men are written, and can be read by persons equipped with the same skills. But they must be read for different things and at different (not really more) levels simultaneously. Those by men, hostile or friendly, must be studied with circumspection: Why is this authority cited and not that one? What figures are included and which left out? Does the author who praises women write in jest, or to please a patron, or, without commitment, to exercise his pen? And why should he exercise his pen on such a subject, if the subject were not one to arouse interest or anxiety?

Texts by women must also be dissected carefully. What is to be done with the nearly universal statements of inadequacy that preface what women have to say? Do the authors believe them? Do they seek the readers' indulgence? Are they inserted simply because they are customary? What audience are they addressing: other women? one or several family members? the learned public? a single patron? What level of education have they attained? What authorities key to the mainstream learned traditions have they mastered? Are they, in fact, the authors of the text.?--many were said not to be. Is the work especially strident in its tone, preposterous in its proposals or its images? These issues arise in the discussion of works by men as well, but come more into play in reading women's works, since women were intruders upon the masculine realm of authorship. Every work written by an early modern woman seems to be, whatever else it is, a meditation on the fact that it is written by a woman.

The scholar who approaches the field of early modern women must bring the same skills as he or she would bring to other early modern fields, but must use them with special delicacy and caution precisely because women's identities are involved in material and literary products in new and unfamiliar ways.

Is there anything left to be done in the field of early modern women? In the last twenty years, an enormous number of editions, translations, studies, and monographs have piled up on bookshelves. On my desk as I write sit fourteen, all published since 1990, picked up on a random stroll through the HQ and PR sections of my college's not especially well-supplied library. Some of the most exciting and paradigm-altering work of this generation of early modern scholars belongs to this field. To zero in on some of the places where more work lies ahead, I'll review what I see as the main areas of successful investigation.

Women and Religion

This has been an obvious starting place for the study of early modern women. In the Middle Ages, the religious sphere was the one where women were most able to possess some autonomy. To what extent did that continue to be the case in a Europe split between Protestants and Catholics, between reformers and conservatives, between secularizers and traditionalists? The last generation has seen explorations of women in Protestantism, both in the mainstream Lutheran, Calvinist, and Anglican settings and in the sects; of women in religious orders; of women prophets and proselytizers; of female sanctity and heterodoxy; of all these things in different national and social settings. We have learned of the increasing restrictions of women's religious experience, both on the Catholic side with requirements of claustration and the close scrutiny of female expression, and on the Protestant side where female leadership wanes as the new denominations become better organized.

What do we still need to learn? I would like to know more about the official churches' intrusion upon the private realm of conscience, through the confessional or pastoral instruction. I would like to know more about the village: how and when were the pagan gods finally unseated in the peasant world, and what role did women play in that final conversion? I would like to know more about the religious training that mothers gave young children, including sons, who through age seven were considered their mothers' students.

The Witchhunt

Not all accused witches were women, but the majority were. Accordingly, the great accumulation of studies of the witchhunt are relevant to the history of women. As the witch-hunt peaked between 1500 and 1650--by any definition, right in the middle of the early modern period--these works are central to the study of early modern women. We have learned that the witch accusation was often launched against the village healer or midwife, against old and poor women, against women perceived as verbally abusive or "scolding." We have seen that the theoretical and technical component of the witch-hunt--the treatises and guides to judicial procedure that I call witch-books--is laden with perduring misogynistic views drawn from the medical, legal, and philosophical traditions. We have learned that the boundary between a witch and a saint, or a witch and a healer, often had to do with class, region, and the presence of the instruments of torture.

What we still don't know is why: Why at this time? Why were women especially targeted? The war on witches seems to have some connection to the nearly simultaneous war on prostitutes, infanticide, and sodomy--all offenses, as it was seen then, against rules pertaining to sexual decorum and gender roles. Movements to contain or restrict the poor (most of whom were women or children), the sick, and the insane are also characteristic of the era. What are the relations between these trends to the efflorescence of intellectual life, the expansion of world trade, and the definition and centralization of states?

Women and Power

Purely by accidents of birth and death that favored females over males in the loftiest ranks of society, the early modern period boasts many women rulers--either those who ruled in their own right (most famously Isabella of Castile and Elizabeth Tudor) or those who were regents during the minorities of their sons (most famously Catherine de Medici). We have learned much about the lives of these women, with special focus on their education and self-definition through ritual and art, and their involvement in the diplomatic and military events of the day.

What remains unclear (except perhaps in the case of Elizabeth) is to what extent these women ruled. How deep was their involvement in developing policy, how profound their subordination to male advisers and rival aristocratic party heads? Many of these female rulers were patrons as well, as were a much larger number of aristocratic women not the titular heads of state. In their commissioning of artists and writers, in their collection of books and paintings, what criteria guided them? Were they shaded by considerations of gender? At court, in the academies, and in the salons, were they concerned to develop social and cultural power? Does the early modern period represent the peak of female influence in cultural institutions--as I believe it is--and if so, why?

Women and Work

As the scale of manufacture and commerce grew, women were increasingly sidelined. As artisans' or merchants' wives in the small-scale medieval town, they might develop high levels of skill and belong to guilds in their own right or, if widows, as surrogates for their husbands. But as the European economy became increasingly oriented toward a region, consisting of a network of cities and towns perhaps focused on a capital or port, or toward the wider globe, as European entrepreneurs dealt with their factors in Asia, Africa, and the Americas, women lost footing. While they still labored, particularly in textile manufacture, they were relegated to lesser and lower-paid jobs.

Outside of manufacture, in the towns, women worked as tavernkeepers, laundresses, prostitutes, actresses and entertainers, and servants, above all as servants, as the establishments of aristocrats and haut bourgeois required larger staffs. We need to know more about these female workers, who migrated from the country and returned there, who moved into and out of prostitution, who were married and single, who abandoned their illegitimate infants or raised their children with the assistance of urban and religious charities.

Women in the Family

The propertied European household subordinated women, as wives, as widows, as children. Women's age at marriage, the requirements of the dowry and limitations on women's ability to acquire and dispose of property, the custom of wetnursing children, the divergent systems for the education or training of girls and boys, the expectations- of silence, obedience and decorum, all contribute to that subordination. On the other hand, the prescriptive literature, both religious and secular, speaks much in this era about love between spouses and sharing of responsibilities. Texts such as letters and diaries also suggest a deepening of emotional intensity in early modern family relations, including those between men and women, and adults and female children. We need to understand these asymmetrical patterns better. Was the family a better place in the eighteenth century, say, than the thirteenth or the tenth?

And were there more families, in the sense of households that possessed property and imposed the economic and cultural limits on women that have been described? There should have been, as the numbers of artisans, merchants, and free peasant proprietors increased relative to the population at large. On the other hand, were there fewer families, as more persons descended to day laborer or to permanent journeyman status, or to homelessness and rootlessness? We need more studies that will illuminate these matters in the various European regions.

To take a stab at answering some of my own questions in anticipation of a full harvest of the evidence, I suspect the following: that the relative subordination of women in the family was as severe if not more severe at the end of our period as at the beginning; and that though women would benefit from the increased wealth of her family, as family wealth increased, so, too, did the restrictions experienced by women. In short, the nature of women's experience within the propertied family probably did not change greatly during the early modern family, although the number of women who experienced such family environments probably increased.

Women and the Medical Profession

At the opening of the early modern period, university-trained professionals (philosophers, theologians, and physicians) were convinced of women's biological inferiority. She was construed as a defective male (following Aristotle). The question was even raised whether she was human (homo), or a member of another species altogether. The seventeenth century finally brought an understanding (though still an incomplete one) of the human reproductive system and the status of women as fully and equally human. This achievement would be reflected in nonmedical discussions of women's nature and would support the feminist awareness characteristic of the era. We need to know more about the communication of scientific knowledge to the general reading public.

Advances in science also caused changes in childbirth for many women, as trained male physicians pushed aside midwives and the community based rituals of confinement and delivery. Much has been written recently on this process, which seems to extend from the fifteenth century in Italy into the nineteenth or twentieth on the fringes of the western world. In women's lives, the break from the midwife is as epochal as the introduction of factory production in the realm of economics. Further exploration is needed of the effect on female psychology of the devaluing of traditional folk wisdom in the whole gynecological/obstetric realm, and the enhancement of the authority of men and male institutions (the university and the hospital), and men's tools (forceps and scalpels). Was the advance in the biological understanding of women counterbalanced by a loss in women's control over their bodies?

Women's Voices

Above all, the early modern is the age of the emergence of woman's voice, the other voice, the voice of that gender previously excluded (some few exceptions aside) from the conversation of the learned. The number of women who entered into the community of intellectual discourse in this age is, by my rough count, in the hundreds--up from a few dozen in the Middle Ages and even fewer in antiquity.

These women authors include novelists and poets, diarists and journalists, letterwriters and chroniclers, philosophers and grammarians, mystics and prophets, translators and authors of travel books, essayists, playwrights, and humanists. They wrote in English, French, German, Dutch, Spanish, Italian, Greek, and Latin. (To these might be added those who "spoke" without words--painters and musicians--whose profile is rather like those of women who wrote.) They talked about themselves and they talked about other things--though scarcely ever, in the works I have seen, is the awareness of being female absent from what they write even if the subject is politics or philosophy. That is why their voice is the other one, differentiated from the masculine voice that defined the mainstream into which they wished to and did enter.

Why now? What were the circumstances of the early modern that promoted women's expression, even as, within the churches, the family, and the economic world, some opportunities were shrinking? The key components seem to be three: humanism, the particular contribution of the Italian Renaissance; printing; and the use of the vernacular languages. These changes, all introduced between 1350 and 1550, made it possible for women to become part of the intellectual elite.

Humanism, the major intellectual movement of the Italian Renaissance, was dominated by men and interested in themes of interest to men. Only a handful of women (versus hundreds of men) were active in humanism during its first and most innovative century. But humanism is a critical antecedent of female expression because of its critique of scholasticism--the whole medieval intellectual edifice based on the university, on the clerical male, on a technical Latin, on the requirements of professional training. Only when the tool of Latin prose was released from that framework could women adapt it (those few who had acquired Latin literacy) to give expression to their own thoughts. Humanists and humanist treatises were not always friendly to women. But humanism opened the world of writing to them.

Printing, like humanism, opens up the intellectual world to women. Before printing, a book needed to be written for an audience within monasteries, schools, and universities, where there were concentrated the overwhelming majority of consumers of books. The printing press made books available to anyone with cash to purchase them and the skill to read them--including other women, whose own energies could be renewed by reading the work of others like themselves. The intermediaries were the normally secular staffs and associates of the printshops: editors and proofreaders.

The use of the vernaculars, finally, opened doors for women. It was furthered by humanists who developed the possibilities of Latin prose style and by the printers who found a market among those without Latin accomplishments. Women's education was normally informal, and thus vernacular; the schools and the universities where Latin reigned were generally closed to them. The widespread availability of classic and modern texts in familiar vernaculars after 1500 fueled women's imaginations and spurred them to compose in their own right, and for and with each other.

What did women write about? Nearly everything that men did outside of the formal disciplines of medicine, theology, and law. Most significantly for the later history of women, they wrote about women: defenses of the female sex and arguments for women's education. Occasionally, men wrote on these matters as well, and women adopted the best of these male-authored texts (those by Erasmus, Vives, Agrippa) for imitation and extension. In these works, the woman's voice that intrudes everywhere that women write comes to the fore. In a secularized intellectual milieu, with widely available books in accessible vernaculars, it will not again go unheard.

What needs to be done to locate and listen to the female voice? We need to recover the writers and their texts. We need critical editions and anthologies, bio-bibliographies and prosopographies. Much of this work is already underway. Text and databases using sophisticated electronic technology are being assembled in cooperative, interdisciplinary projects. Texts series are in production. In my own small corner of the vineyard in which I labor with my colleague Albert Rabil, Jr., as coeditor, I am watching emerge a series of translations of texts by continental authors specifically addressing feminist issues. The list has grown rapidly from an original group of five or six, to ten, and now reaching to twenty.

But there is more to be done if we are to find the contours of the phenomenon of women's expression in the early modern era not limited by language, century, ideology, or genre. First we need a database; and second, an encyclopedia. An openended, constantly updated computer database would allow us to track all identifiable women authors. An encyclopedia, based on the entries in that database, would be the tangible account of what is now known about the women of this era.

I have enumerated the areas where the last generation, as I see it, has made enormous progress in the study of early modern women, and indicated where I see the need for further development. Now let me address a larger issue: we need fewer anthologies, with close studies of individual figures and texts, and more general works that cross disciplinary and regional boundaries.

On the disciplinary front, the gap between history and literature looms large (with art history and philosophy tending to one camp or the other). From the literary-critical perspective, what historians do must look naive. Historians (and I am one of them) could learn more from their colleagues down the hall about the complexity of "discourses" characteristic of works by early modern women. From the historians' perspective, much of the literary-critical analysis seems impenetrable and not always important. Our colleagues down the hall, as they weave their "contextualizing" studies, might take note that what historians do is to "contextualize" on a full-time basis--a task they have been pursuing for at least the last century.

Historians, moreover, have a commitment to those who never wrote anything as well as to those who did. Thus, they study women across the social spectrum. Literary experts study literature, the definition of which is broader than it once was. Nevertheless, even as the number of women writers balloons in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, women who wrote were overwhelmingly from the uppermost social strata--the top 2 to 10 percent of the population, reaching with few exceptions no further down the social ladder than the upper bourgeoisie. In England, the focus of interest of most of our literary scholars, the class lines are drawn even higher. Because the women's voices we hear sing out from such a narrow slice of the population does not mean they are unimportant. But it is important to remain aware of that narrowness.

Similarly, scholars of all the disciplines that participate in the study of early modern women need to reflect on how narrowly they draw their regional boundaries. England and France predominate; we know a little about the German cities, more about Italy, less about Spain; scarcely anything about eastern Europe. Worse, although some historians have brought anthropological perspectives to bear on their study of European marriage and household patterns, few scholars pay much attention to contemporary Asian, African, Latin American, or Islamic societies. Yet, as we deplore the constraints placed on European women in the past and celebrate their ability to express themselves nevertheless, we need to compare the European experience with that of other societies. When we do so, we find that European women generally enjoyed astonishing social and psychological freedom. That relative freedom took form as the two contributory streams of western civilization had their impact on the second sex: the Christian, which modified Roman law and Germanic tribal custom to acknowledge the selfhood of all human beings, even females; and the classical, from which derives concepts of citizenship that, however grudgingly, were extended to women as well as men.

What is distinctive, finally, about the history of women in the early modern period is the emergence of woman's voice in the chorus of intellectual life--even as, in music, women's voices were written into motets for the first time and joined the chorales sung in churches. This preeminence of the woman's voice is not characteristic only of early modern Europe--it is also unique to western civilization. Just as the colonizing western world took the lead in the world, after 1500 approximately, in technology and science, in shipping and in industrial production, it did so, too, in nurturing feminist consciousness. Let's give credit where it's due.