Women's Letters Across Europe, 1400û1700: Form and Persuasion

by Crabb,Ann

• ISBN13: 9780754651079
• ISBN10: 075465107X
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2005-12-28
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

This is a superb collection of essays that covers women across Europe and England and offers new insights not only into women's letter writing, but also into the boundaries of script and print, the complexities of early modern literacy, the intersection of public and private spaces, and the ways that women garnered power through direct and indirect means. Many authors offer quotations and translations of manuscript letters otherwise inaccessible to most readers, and the book is a pleasure to read. Jane Donawerth, Professor of English, University of Maryland In response to a growing interest, among historians as well as literary critics, in women's use of the epistolary genre, Women's Letters Across Europe, 1400-1700: Form and Persuasion analyzes persuasive techniques in the personal correspondence of late medieval and early modern women. It includes studies of well-known women (Isabella d'Este, Teresa of Avila, Marguerite de Navarre, Catherine de Medicis), of those less-known (Alessandra Macigni Strozzi, Louise de Coligny, Glikl of Hameln, Argula von Grumbach, Luisa de Carvajal y Mendoza, Anna Maria von Schurman, Barbara of Brandenburg ) and of others virtually unknown to history (prosperous women like Elizabeth Stonor and Cornelia Collonello and pauper women seeking poor relief in Tours). Comprehensive in scope, Women's Letters Across Europe, 1400-1700 looks at women from England, Italy, France, Spain, Germany, and the Netherlands, and from various levels of society, encompassing the nobility, the gentry, the middle class, and the poor. Each of the essayists considers letters both as historical documents giving insights into women's lives, and as texts in which variations on epistolary forms are used for specific persuasive purposes. The authors of the essays analyze their subjects' capabilities and limitations as letter writers and the techniques they used to influence correspondents, setting these observations in the framework of the women's particular 'stories.' Taken together, the essays and the letter writers discussed therein illustrate in new ways how far from silenced many early modern women were, how they were able to adopt and adapt strategies from the epistolary conventions available to them, and how they could have an impact on their worlds through their letters.

Table of Contents

List of Figures	ix
Notes on Contributors	x
Acknowledgements	xiv
INTRODUCTION
1 Form and Persuasion in Women's Letters, 1400-1700	3	(18)
Jane Couchman and Ann Crabb
PART ONE: PERSUASION FOR FAMILY AND PERSONAL GOALS
2 How to Influence Your Children: Persuasion and Form in Alessandra Macigni Strozzi's Letters to Her Sons	21	(22)
Ann Crabb
3 'A Masterful Woman': Elizabeth Stonor and English Women's Letters, 1399–c.1530	43	(20)
Malcolm Richardson
4 'Much could be written': Glikl of Hameln's Life in Writing	63	(16)
Erin Henriksen and Mark Zelcer
5 'I am the same Cornelia I have always been': Reading Cornelia Collonello's Letters to Michelangelo	79	(24)
Deborah Stott
6 Letters Across the Borders: Strategies of Communication in an Italian-German Renaissance Correspondence	103	(20)
Christina Antenhofer
7 Isabella d'Este and the Properties of Persuasion	123	(20)
Deanna Shemek
PART TWO: PUBLIC AND PRIVATE INTERSECTING
8 'I wold wyshe my doings myght be...secret': Privacy and the Social Practices of Reading Women's Letters in Sixteenth-Century England	143	(20)
James Daybell
9 'Give birth quickly and then send us your good husband': Informal Political Influence in the Letters of Louise de Coligny	163	(22)
Jane Couchman
10 'Pregnant with 100,000 Soldiers': The Correspondence of Marguerite de Navarre and François I	185	(22)
Barbara Stephenson
11 In the Queen's Words: Perceptions of Regency Government Gleaned from the Correspondence of Catherine de Medicis	207	(16)
Elizabeth McCartney
12 'Burdened with small children': Women Defining Poverty in Sixteenth-Century Tours	223	(18)
Susan Broomhall
PART THREE: VALIDATED BY GOD AND BY REASON
13 'Dear Daughter': Reform and Persuasion in St Teresa's Letters to Her Prioresses	241	(22)
Alison Weber
14 The Religious Warrior: Luisa de Carvajal y Mendoza's Correspondence with Rodrigo de Calderon	263	(12)
Elena Leyv-Navarro
15 Form and Persuasion in the Correspondence of Argula von Grumbach	275	(22)
Peter Matheson
16 The French Reception of Anna Maria van Schurman's Letters on Women's Education (1646)	297	(18)
Anne R. Larsen
Selected General Bibliography	315	(14)
Index	329