In 1415, Francesco Barbaro produced a marriage manual intended at once for his friend, a scion of the Florentine Medici family, and for the whole set of his peers, the young nobility of Venice. Countering the trends of the day toward dowry chasing and dowry inflation, Barbaro insisted that the real wealth of wives was their capacity to conceive, birth, and rear children worthy of their heritage. The success of the patriciate depended, ironically, on women: for they alone could ensure the biological, cultural, and spiritual reproduction of their marital lineage. The Wealth of Wives circulated in more than 100 manuscript versions, five Latin editions, and translations into German, Italian, French, and English, far outstripping in its influence Leon Battista Alberti’s On the Family (1434).

The forty texts collected in this volume offer a small but representative sample of Quaker women’s tremendous literary output between 1655 and 1700. They include examples of key Quaker literary genres — proclamations, directives, warnings, sufferings, testimonies, polemic, pleas for toleration — and showcase a range of literary styles and voices, from eloquent poetry to legal analyses of English canon and civil law. In their varied responses to the core Quaker belief in the indwelling Spirit, these women left a rich literary legacy of an early countercultural movement.

The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe - The Toronto Series: Volume 60

This volume presents ten plays by three leading women playwrights of Spain’s Golden Age. Included are four bawdy and outrageous comic interludes; a full-length comedy involving sorcery, chivalry, and dramatic stage effects; and five short religious plays satirizing daily life in the convent. A critical introduction to the volume positions these women and their works in the world of seventeenth-century Spain.

This volume presents three plays by women that were written in specific household contexts and survive in distinctive handwritten copies dating from their authors’ lifetimes. Care is taken in the introductions, notes, and apparatus to make the plays accessible to non-specialist readers while also preserving early modern orthography, punctuation, and manuscript practices. Each play is presented in an edited old-spelling text and set within its literary, biographical, and theatrical context. The volume as a whole foregrounds the early modern household as a uniquely productive setting for women’s theatrical and literary activity.

Volume 66 in the Other Voice in Early Modern Europe - The Chicago Series

Margaret Fell (1614–1702), one of the co-founders of the Society of Friends and a religious activist, was a prolific writer and distributor of Quaker pamphlets. This volume offers eight texts that span her writing career and represent her range of writing: autobiography, epistle or public letter, examination or record of a trial, letter to the king, and argument for women’s preaching. These selections also document Fell’s contributions to Friends’ theology, exemplify seventeenth-century women’s English-language literacy, illustrate Fell’s theories of biblical reading, and exhibit the common qualities of Quaker rhetoric.

The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe - The Toronto Series, volume 65

In this weighty edition of Elizabeth Cooke Hoby Russell’s works, based on extensive archival research, Patricia Phillippy brings together all known writings by her: letters, poems in English, Latin, and Greek, documents describing and planning christenings, weddings, and funerals, monumental inscriptions, entertainments, petitions, and Russell’s will. This ambitious and timely collection puts into practice recent critical arguments about the nature of women’s writings and the importance of occasional verse, familial poetry, letters, and petitions as characteristically women’s work. This collection also situates Russell, a woman, squarely and influentially in the humanist tradition, and explores her important place in English letters. This edition moves the field of early modern women’s studies into new territory, with its treatment of monumental verse as an integral part of Russell’s oeuvre.
—Jane Donawerth
Professor of English and affiliate faculty in women’s studies
University of Maryland

An erudite abbess of Port-Royal, Angélique de Saint-Jean Arnauld d’Andilly (1624 – 1684) resisted the demands of church and state to condemn the Jansenist theological doctrines which the convent had long upheld. In her autobiographical Report on Captivity, Angélique de Saint-Jean recounts her personal methods of spiritual resistance as she and her fellow nuns underwent waves of persecution resulting in exile, house arrest, interdict, and excommunication. Her voluminous theological writings present the theoretical basis for this resistance, limiting the claims of political and ecclesiastical authorities over the conscience of the individual. In particular, she defends the right of women to refuse to surrender their convictions due to specious appeals to obedience and humility.

The Bolognese nun Diodata Malvasia was presumed to have authored only one work, The Arrival and the Miraculous Workings of the Glorious Image of the Virgin (1617). In her recently discovered second manuscript chronicle, A Brief Discourse on What Occurred to the Most Reverend Sisters of the Joined Convents of San Mattia and San Luca (1575), her writing demonstrates active resistance to Tridentine convent reform. Together, Malvasia’s works read as the bookends to a lifelong crusade on behalf of her convent.