This book reveals the importance of personal letters in the history of European women between the year 1000 and the advent of the telephone. It explores the changing ways that women used correspondence for self-expression and political mobilization over this period, enabling them to navigate the myriad gendered restrictions that limited womens engagement in the world. Whether written from the medieval cloister, or the renaissance court, or the artisans workshop, or the drawing room, letters crossed geographical and social distance and were mobile in ways that women themselves could not always be. Women wrote to govern, to argue, to plead, and to demand. They also wrote to express love and intimacy, and in so doing, to explain and to understand themselves. This book argues that the personal letter was a crucial place for European womens self-fashioning, and that exploring the history of their letters offers a profound insight into their subjectivity and agency over time.
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Product Details
Dimensions: 156 x 234mm
Publication Date: 24 Jul 2023
Publisher: Amsterdam University Press
Publication City/Country: Netherlands
Language: English
ISBN13: 9789463723381
About Barbara CaineCarolyn JamesClare MonagleDavid Garrioch
Clare Monagle is Professor of History in the Department of History and Archaeology at Macquarie University. Her books include Orthodoxy and Controversy in Twelfth-Century Religious Discourse for Brepols in 2013 and Scholastic Affect in 2020 for Cambridge University Press Elements series. Carolyn James is Cassamarca Professor of History at Monash University. Her latest monograph A Renaissance Marriage: The Political and Personal Alliance of Isabella dEste and Francesco Gonzaga 1490-1519 was published by Oxford University Press in 2020. David Garrioch is Emeritus Professor at Monash University and author of The Making of Revolutionary Paris (University of California Press 2002). He recently edited The Republic of Skill. Artisan Mobility Innovation and the Circulation of Knowledge in Premodern Europe(Brill 2022). Barbara Caine is Professor Emerita at the University of Sydney. Her works include Bombay to Bloomsbury: A Biography of the Strachey Family (OUP 2005) and Biography and History (Palgrave 2010) and Women and the Autobiographical Impulse: a History (Bloomsbury forthcoming 2023)