Early Modern Women's Work

Kinship, Community, and Social Justice
1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-032-21131-2
Verlag: Taylor & Francis Ltd

Buch, Englisch, 200 Seiten, Format (B × H): 156 mm x 234 mm, Gewicht: 370 g

Reihe: New Interdisciplinary Approaches to Early Modern Culture

Early Modern Women’s Work examines the contributions of female writers, artists, scientists, religious leaders, and patrons who engaged in entrepreneurial, intellectual, and emotional labor in German-speaking Europe. Through individual and collective authorship, the women analyzed in this study assert a claim to kinship and community, often beyond the hegemonic, heteronormative relationships to family, religion, and monarch.

The contributions of early modern women to the construction of productive work spaces and the establishment of intellectual and actual communities are often overlooked or underestimated in scholarship on this period. This book serves as a cultural corrective to suppositions of gender-coded work, because alongside the dominant history of the private sphere as a feminine domain, a counter-narrative emerges with collective authorship. Despite the disparities in their biographies, the women whose work Simpson foregrounds highlight a range of early modern concerns, primarily but not exclusively in German-speaking Europe. These include debates about women’s education and erudition; migration and displacement in search of religious or professional freedom; a persistent but varied discourse about female authorship and creative agency; and the assertion of subjectivity against the violent, fractious history of the Thirty Years’ War and beyond.

This book will be an ideal resource for students, scholars, and all those interested in German and European studies, women and gender studies, and the history of early modern work.

Zielgruppe

Postgraduate and Undergraduate Advanced

Autoren/Hrsg.

Simpson, Patricia Anne

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtliche Themen Mentalitäts- und Sozialgeschichte
• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Soziale Gruppen/Soziale Themen Gender Studies, Geschlechtersoziologie
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Europäische Geschichte

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Introduction: Early Modern Women’s Work: Kinship, Community, and Social Justice

Chapter One: Emotional Labor: The Work of Mourning

Chapter Two: Acts of Faith: Maternality and Management

Chapter Three: Writing for Your Life: Refuge and Precarity

Chapter Four: Collaborations: Engendering Literary Identities

Chapter Five: Kinship: “Amateurs” of Nature and Imitation

Conclusion: Early Modern Lexicons: Gendered Communities and Social Justice

Selected Readings

Index

Über Autor(innen)

Patricia Anne Simpson is Professor of German at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Her research interests encompass the literature and history of German-speaking Europe, from early modernity to the present. Her recent monograph, German Empires and Decolonial Fantasies, 1492–1942 (2025), engages German colonial entanglements and the narratives they generated from the perspective of contemporary critical race theory.