Women's Agency in Early Modern Europe

Abstract

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• Women’s Agency in Early Modern Europe
• Kate Allan (bio) and Nupur Patel (bio)

Agency has long been a touchstone in early modern scholarship, and in scholarship of women’s and gender studies. Since at least the 1970s, scholars have emphasised how ‘individuals and groups beyond white male elites had the capacity to act, make choices, and intentionally shape their own lives and the world around them to some degree’.¹ Influential modes of thinking have understood agency variously as a woman’s capacity to act for herself; to speak on behalf of herself or a collective; to have influence over and exert power in a variety of contexts, including social networks, domestic, religious, and political settings, and through the written word.² Others have framed agency as a ‘more open ended’ concept, focusing our attention on the negotiation of power to account for cases where we do not see women, as ‘the subordinate subjects[,] challenge the system of rule in systematic or revolutionary ways’.³ This approach to agency has shown that action is not always subversive and that expressions of agency may include survival and existence.⁴ Scholarly debate has grappled with how we might define agency with any degree of specificity, how we can identify the historically contingent forms of agency, and what an awareness of agency contributes to the study of early modern women.⁵ Most recently, this research has highlighted that agency is most productive as a ‘conceptual tool’, a starting point, rather than a predefined notion. Approaching agency in this way allows us to move away from a simple conception of a woman as ‘having agency’ towards a more nuanced understanding [End Page 1] of how agency was expressed through a diverse range of material, textual, and social structures or practices.⁶

Recent scholarship about women’s participation in transnational communities and about transcultural mobility and identity more broadly has invested female agency—too frequently afforded to women only in the domestic domain—with a global significance. At the same time as agency has been recognised as historically and socially contingent, scholars have explored how it is determined by local, regional, national, and transcultural affiliations.⁷ Criticism on agency increasingly attends to ‘the way that social rank, marital status, chronological and geographical location affected women’s agency’.⁸ Collaborative and comparative approaches to early modern literature and culture have dramatically reshaped our understandings of female cross-cultural production, uncovering, for instance, women’s agency as travellers and the way this shaped their literary representation.⁹ As the field of women’s writing increasingly explores broader models of authorial agency in literary production, so does it prompt us to attend to ‘the full complexities of the locations the writing comes from, and how and why that locatedness matters’.¹⁰

This special issue takes its cue from Merry Wiesner-Hanks’s call in a recent collection, Challenging Women’s Agency and Activism in Early Modernity, for scholarship in women’s and gender history ‘to historicize agency, to use it as a starting point rather than a conclusion’.¹¹ It was a challenge repeated during Wiesner-Hanks’s keynote at the interdisciplinary symposium ‘Women and Agency: Transnational Perspectives, c. 1450–1790’, held virtually at the University of Oxford in June 2021.¹² The symposium sought to explore how women’s agency was negotiated and expressed within the context of the wider social structures in which early modern women lived. It was catalysed not only by scholarship which [End Page 2] has explored early modern women’s multifaceted experiences across literary, cultural, and political spheres, but also by the urgent conversations about women’s agency that have responded globally to anti-violence and anti-discrimination campaigns, including in Mexico, Poland, and Iran. The panels, ‘Creating Agency’, ‘Crafting Agency’, ‘Embodying Agency’, addressed how women asserted agency in different cultural spheres and everyday practices. We turned to the actions of women both individually as ‘Mobile Agents’, and as part of a collective, in ‘Networks of Agency’. Finally, we interrogated early modern expectations surrounding gender roles and case-studies of women who challenged or disrupted those expectations, some in accordance with contemporary literary, philosophical, and political movements, with panels on ‘Challenging...