Introduction: Women and Community in Early Modern Europe

The scholar’s project to understand women’s situations, roles, and identities in any given space, over any given period, encounters two important challenges: access to the subjects themselves and interpretive perspective on their lives and accomplishments. When the given period is the pre-modern era this is especially true, as women’s direct expressions were inhibited by lack of education and imposition of social decorum, and their visibility as agents of action was limited. Some women – almost exclusively those of an elite class – managed to negotiate roles for themselves within systems structured to deny them as much, but doing so required them to circumvent the normal conduits to power and manifest their presence by much less visible means than those afforded men. How can we come to know women for whom there are scarce and scattered traces of personal experience, and for whom primary documentation is dominated by men’s perspective? Where do we look for these women and, once we find them, how can we understand their strategies for enacting individual and collective agency?

The contributors to this volume of Scholar & Feminist Online address these questions with respect to women in a range of social situations in pre-modern Europe. The study of women in the period covered here allows us to build on existing scholarship and incorporate new perspectives and access points. Because self-expression and direct action were not options for most women in this period, we are compelled to search in the interstices of published documentation and archival sources, and to analyze in imaginative ways the traces that emerge. The need to look for women’s presence and to hear their voices in new places and ways is an opportunity to sharpen our approach to social history. For this purpose, this volume focuses on women from the late fifteenth to the late eighteenth century, over a period of major social transitions and ideological shifts that were, paradoxically, accompanied by little enduring change in women’s ability to speak and act for themselves. It also focuses primarily on women in and near France, where during this period societal structures saw rapid transformation, yet not in thought related to women. European culture in the early modern era thus provides a rich terrain upon which to examine the strategies that women adopted to establish agency. It also allows us to discern how these strategies changed over time in the evolving social contexts in which women were both an integral part and a largely silent presence.

The essays in this volume are further framed by consideration of how the emergence of self-identity and personal agency occurs in collective spaces that both require a degree of conformity to and allow for deviation from established parameters.¹ The contributors present new evidence drawn from cultural production within communities, both women-centered and mixed gender, to examine how women participated directly or indirectly in the collective agendas and projects of those groups. The subjects examined here are, of necessity, women who had the economic means and the social capital to participate in cultural production. While these women have been recognized in previous scholarship, the unconventional means they used to negotiate agency through community invites further discussion. For this reason, we look specifically to collectives that are less circumscribed and less clearly defined than, for instance, convents or béguinages. All of the essays take as their primary evidence intellectual and artistic production by women, as well as what Kathryn L. Reyerson aptly describes as “documents of practice”; these sources point to relations of collective association that afforded women “various forms of capital – social, economic, and symbolic.”² In the first part of the volume, “Imagining Community,” the contributors encourage us to examine from new angles what community meant to women and where we might look to find evidence of their agency.³ This evidence contains traces of women from the late medieval to early modern era who reconfigured or altered collective action in ways that have not been previously considered. In the second part of the volume, “Enlightened Collaboration,” the contributors continue this work, sharpen their focus on social collectives in eighteenth-century France, and examine how, in the context of the Enlightenment, women came to use social networks to fashion and assert self-identity and strengthen their communities. The present volume was inspired by the Fourth International Margot Conference, Women and Community in the Ancien Régime: Traditional & New Media, held at Barnard College in June 2014. The essays published here took as their starting point presentations delivered at that conference, an engaging and lively exchange that led the contributors to develop their work further. Like the work of the women they discuss, the essays themselves are the fruit of collaboration and interaction.

Part One: Imagining Community

To open this volume, Francesca Sautman in “Building Women’s Community through Patronage in Late-Fifteenth-Century Burgundy” takes as a subject Isabel of Portugal, duchess of Burgundy (1397–1471), a woman known for her considerable power in royal politics and specifically in the Burgundian court of her husband, Philip the Good, and her son, Charles the Bold. Isabel had a strong presence in the court as an effective negotiator on behalf of her husband’s family’s interests, especially in Burgundian efforts to solidify their relations with English royalty, from which Isabel herself was descended. Sautman invites us to recognize the limits of Isabel’s agency, and to take a broader view on how she created an identity for herself that far exceeded that of consort and facilitator. This leads us to extend our perception of community building to include activities that are individual, sometimes intensely private, and also generative of a sense of collective belonging. It also adjusts the notion of “patronage” to focus less on the products of agency, and more on the context and process of achieving it.

To do this, Sautman first builds on recent scholarship that proposes similar expansions of the notion of community to include activities such as writing, reading, and viewing – endeavors that are not temporally or spatially confined. This allows us to observe the cumulative force of Isabel’s engagement with projects as diverse as founding religious houses, promoting literary and artistic production, and directing a series of donor portraits that portray Isabel with her patron saint, the thirteenth-century Elizabeth of Hungary who was a crowned queen canonized a mere four years after her death. These pursuits establish enduring connections between Isabel and women from her past, present, and future. These engagements also created associations with a wider sphere of powerful women. They are what Sautman calls “imagined communities” because they require an imaginative extension across time and space and defy the limits and exigencies of royal family politics.

Of course, it can be said that Isabel was engaged in activities that were not unusual for a woman of her station in life.⁴ Indeed, her religious, literary, and artistic practices were customary of women in the aristocratic realm. But Sautman points to particular aspects of Isabel’s pursuits that allow us to see them as intentional and coherent efforts at community building of a different kind.

First of all, Isabel’s engagement displays an energy and determination to create connections between women who, while not physically present with each other, reinforced a mutual collective identity. In part, this identity formed through bonds of family lineage and royal responsibility; Isabel’s immediate entourage included a dozen or so female family members and protegées with whom she cultivated special relationships. But even stronger were the bonds she created through devotional practice as inspired by the devotio moderna, a movement of apostolic commitment among the elite laity, and especially among women, in Isabel’s day. The devotio moderna sprang from a desire to reform religious life and a need for collectives of the faithful that were more fluid than traditional, ecclesiastically authorized orders. Finally, Sautman demonstrates that while Isabel’s establishing of “elusive communities” of women began in tandem with the pursuits of her husband and family and within a noblewoman’s usual parameters, her activities took on a new intensity and focus after 1457 when she broke from her responsibilities as duchess and embraced active lay piety. Leaving behind secular splendor and royal power, Isabel enjoyed greater freedom that extended to establishing a hospital for elderly women in her own residence and founding religious houses for women. Sautman examines how in her very active “retreat,” energized by the spirit of devotio moderna, Isabel effectively inverted the worldly requirements of the Burgundian court to create a different kind of noble household – one deeply committed to women, to the spirit of reform, and to apostolic action.

Sautman’s analysis of how Isabel forged a distinctive role and heritage for herself inspires a reevaluation of seemingly conventional noble activities that considers their context and purpose. The result is a more capacious understanding of community for women and a more nuanced perspective on Isabel’s creation of her own identity in the spheres open to her.

In the city of Strasbourg, we find an entirely different social milieu – that of evangelical reform. The movement sought to liberate Christians from the hierarchical control of the Catholic Church and to allow the faithful to experience more directly their faith. The reform included women in its vision of those who could enter into a direct relationship with God, yet it did not allow them the freedom to express that experience or a clear path to enacting a strong presence in its community. Relegated to the subordinate roles of wife and mother, women were seen as ancillary to the work of men. However, between the pages of official Protestant history are women who sought to influence the practices and ethos of the new religion. Such was the case of Katharina Schütz Zell, the subject of Sini Mikkola’s essay “By the Grace of God: Women’s Agency in the Rhetoric of Katharina Schütz Zell and Martin Luther.”

Schütz Zell built a strong presence in the first generation of the reform movement and had an independent spirit uncharacteristic of what was prescribed for women. She first learned of reformist ideals from her priest, Matthew Zell, who was the pastor of the Strasbourg cathedral; she married Zell and herself became an extraordinarily active and vocal reformer. Considered “Mother” by the reform community in Strasbourg, Schütz Zell was also a writer, with thirty years of published and privately circulating work.⁵ She was known for her zeal and determination to promote reform through charitable action and through writing letters and pamphlets. In her first publication of 1524, Letter to the Suffering Women of the Community of Kentzingen, Who Believe in Christ, Sisters with Me in Christ, Schütz Zell reaches out to the women of a town embroiled in strife between the local bishop and the Protestant citizens. The text is a consolatio for the townswomen who had been abandoned and forced to bear the authorities’ wrath when the men of Kentzingten fled with their reformist pastor. But the letter is also a call for reform directed to the women; Schütz Zell exhorts them to view their predicament as an opportunity to demonstrate agency, a “manly Abraham-like courage.” Two months later, she published a treatise in favor of clerical marriage, Apologia for Master Matthew Zell, Her Husband, Who Is a Pastor and Servant of the Work of God in Strasbourg, Because of the Great Lies Invented about Him. Here she defends her own marriage of some months earlier, an act she describes as a decision she made not out of desire to marry, but as a way to help her husband and all Christians. She claims it her duty as a Christian to strike down the falsehoods told about Zell and about her marriage, both in order to defend her husband and to protect others from grave error if they decline to follow his theology. To remain silent would constitute heresy, she claims, whereas to speak and write are acts of truth. The threads of Schütz Zell’s argument, emphatic and occasionally rambling, are held together by ample Biblical quotations, a rhetorically empowering move that proves the ability to confront her husband’s theological opponents, whom she does not hesitate to name.

Mikkola demonstrates that Schütz Zell’s audacious self-authorization in the Apologia occurred largely through her recalibration of woman’s position in the gender hierarchy. This is achieved as the author associates herself with the power of the male corps of reformist theologians and insists on her role in helping Zell – as his wife – enact his own evangelical authority. Taken together, the two texts from 1524 constitute a call not for a shift in gender roles but for a reorientation of perspective on those roles; this empowers not only Schütz Zell herself, but all the women in her faith community as well.

Both Schütz Zell’s letter and her treatise were read by Martin Luther; her claim in the Apologia to agency in the reform movement was validated by a letter he wrote her not long after. In it, Luther approves of Schütz Zell’s marriage and her decision to relate her experience as an act of self-affirmation and co-operation in the larger collective. In the second part of her essay, Mikkola examines how this response reveals more nuance within how Luther perceived of women’s function within the evangelical community. Certainly, Luther never altered his position on women as subordinate to men, in the domestic realm especially. However, in his observations to Schütz Zell on her choice to marry – and to write – he affirms the equal value of women and men in the collective of the faithful, and the necessity for joint action. Mikkola reads Luther’s response to Schütz Zell in light of comments in his other writings; these together suggest that a more careful look at Luther’s position on gender hierarchy is warranted. Schütz Zell’s exceptional assertion of agency within the reform community may well have caused one of its founders to rethink, ever so slightly, the role of women overall.

The social context in which Schütz Zell lived and wrote granted her license, albeit a limited one, to assert a visible place for women within the broader reform community and even to insist on the value and critical necessity of women for the success of the movement. As long as the identity she claimed for women was commensurate with an orthodox evangelical vision of their place in society, the force of that identity – and its direct expression – was acceptable to the community, or at least to its founder and ultimate authority. Almost contemporary with Schütz Zell, but further south in the city of Siena, women played a vital role in another mixed community: that of literary academies.

In late Renaissance Italy, the literary academies that began to appear in the early cinquecento were institutions that promoted networks of intellectual exchange and social influence. Dedicated to a wide range of literary and theatrical endeavors, these academies often pushed the limits of social debate and formulated social dissent by subtle and indirect means.⁶ Official membership in the academies was limited almost exclusively to Latin-educated elite men who conducted most of their literary activity behind the closed doors of their private homes. Women were present in the life of the academies: as the source of the men’s poetic inspiration and the object of their creative energy; as patronesses who sought a civic role through cultural engagement; as discerning audiences for the development of vernacular literature; and as correspondents and interlocutors in exchanges and dialogues.⁷ However, as a forum for serious intellectual conversation and the sharing of new ideas, the academies kept women on the periphery; it is therefore necessary to look between the lines of their official history and published works to discover women who are more than observers and supporters.

In her essay, “Il Dialogo de’ giuochi by Girolamo Bargagli and the Women of Siena: Culture, Independence, and Politics,” Elena Brizio provides archival documentation of specific women in one of the earliest, possibly even the first, of the Italian academies: the Accademia degli Intronati, established in Siena in 1525. The Accademia is recognized for cultivating an environment favorable to women’s education and for promoting a more assertive role for women than was often the case in the Italian academic milieu. This is especially evident in a number of dialogues produced by Intronati members in which women constitute all or part of the cast of interlocutors. The Dialogo (composed 1563 to 1564 and published 1572) is set in 1557 to 1558, when the Intronati recommenced their activities following the siege and eventual demise of the republic of Siena in the 1550s. The work is a retrospective fictional conversation, set in a time before Siena was divided into the factions that ultimately rendered civil social exchange between political opponents impossible. Bargagli describes some 130 parlor games of the Accademia’s veglie (social gatherings); these ludic competitions allowed the players to demonstrate their wit and their knowledge of vernacular literature. In the Dialogo, the games are recreated from the memories of the main speaker named “Sodo,” as they were played in the golden pre-war years of Siena, before the city’s fall to Florentine powers. It was hoped that these games might provide the basis for the continuation of ludic civility by a new generation of Sienese elite.

As Brizio points out, Bargagli’s Dialogo is somewhat exceptional for the genre in that, instead of leaving its women under the cover of anonymity with fictitious names, it identifies them by their historical names, reflecting explicitly a network of family, and therefore political, connections. By documenting who these women were, Brizio points to their alliances within the Accademia and their presence in Sienese politics. The Dialogo creates a picture of an idyllic past and women’s place in it, with a clear bias towards families supporting the Imperial and Spanish side of the conflict with France. The playful setting in which the women are cast in the Dialogo hides a more serious, intentional representation of the civilizing effect they had on society and the networks of influence within which they worked.

The academies of cinquecento Italy foreshadow in many respects the social configurations and intellectual activity taking place on an international scale in the cercles and sociétés of the later Republic of Letters.⁸ As in the Enlightenment salons, women in the Italian academies took on multiple functions and identities. Identifying and understanding their roles, however, requires a look to the periphery of the established spaces. Brizio provides the kind of careful archival research that makes visible those women who, while working from the margins, nevertheless had a significant influence in the social, intellectual, and political life of their communities. Indeed, it is increasingly clear that our appreciation of the scope and nature of the activities of the academies is incomplete without consideration of their presence.

A woman who understood well how to exercise power from the periphery was Madame de Maintenon, the second wife of the French king Louis XIV, who is the focus of Mallika Lecoeur’s essay “Conversation as Child’s Play: The Performances of Madame de Maintenon’s Conversations at the Royale Maison de Saint-Louis.” Françoise d’Aubigné, the granddaughter of the Huguenot poet Agrippa d’Aubigné, spent her entire life on the margins of French court society. Born in a jail cell where her father was incarcerated for counterfeiting, life quickly took her to marriage with the irreverent and unconventional poet Paul Scarron, widowhood, and then the position of governess to Louis XIV’s illegitimate offspring. She purchased for herself the château of Maintenon in 1674 and was granted the tile of the domaine the following year. Widely recognized today as an important influence on the king in his mature years, she had no official position at court, a situation that did not change after she secretly married Louis in 1683. The importance of Maintenon in the evolution of the king’s later personal life is well-documented. But she also sought to exercise a broader social influence through the École de Saint-Cyr, which she founded with Louis XIV in 1684, and which she directed herself until her death there in 1719. This school for orphaned girls of the provincial nobility has long been considered Maintenon’s defining achievement. It was in many respects a way for her to channel the multiple contradictions of her experience to a constructive end, that of helping young women in their transition to the community in which they were destined to spend their lives: the domestic sphere of the lower nobility, the very milieu from which Maintenon herself had come.

Saint-Cyr’s curriculum, for the most part, adhered to the conventions of a conservative, morally focused woman’s education. Exceptional, though, were the simulated conversations that Maintenon created for her students to memorize and enact before each other and also before men and women who visited from the court who watched the performed exchanges. The content of the Conversations, generally conforming to what was required of morally upright noblewomen, has previously been studied. Lecoeur focuses rather on how the students performed the exchanges; she also demonstrates how Maintenon used play to solidify the ethos of the school community and to prepare the students for their future roles in society. Lecoeur demonstrates that the conversational exercises permitted the students both to develop the skill of being “naturally” conversant in topics they would be expected to discuss, and to assume a persona that gave them a voice – even at an age when their peers often remained invisible and silent. This was a transition that most young women acquired only later, after some experience at court or in the salons. The Conversations also trained the young interlocutors in irony; that is, the ability to detect ambiguity, contradiction, and disagreement and to exploit it to their advantage. The aristocratic audience observing the girls’ performances was delighted because they found the witty and intelligent exchanges so convincing. Maintenon and her students created a simulation of polite society that corresponded to the spectators’ image of themselves.

At Saint-Cyr, the performance art of conversation prepared the girls to use representation within the community they would eventually inhabit. Such a skill was not intended to empower the students; Madame de Maintenon herself was staunchly conservative and no proponent of women’s higher intellectual development. She eventually came to bemoan the success of the Conversations as her students began to develop opinions and critical judgments of their own. Nevertheless, we can see here how Madame de Maintenon, almost in spite of herself, fostered sociabilité as a critical tool for women’s social mobility; this sociabilité would continue to be a powerful instrument of their agency in the Enlightenment, as they essays in the second part of the volume explore.

1. For the theoretical background connecting self-identity formation and community in the period concerned, with special reference to women’s situations, see Laura Delbrugge, ed., Self-Fashioning and Assumptions of Identity in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 2–7. [↩]
2. Kathryn L. Reyerson, Women’s Networks in Medieval France (Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), xxii–xxiii. The foundational work of Pierre Bourdieu and Michel de Certeau in the concept of social practices and relational networks is acknowledged by Reyerson and is implicitly present in the methodology adopted in the present volume as well. [↩]
3. The term “imagined community” as used here does not imply the formation of a nation or a national consciousness, as in the work of Benedict Anderson. It denotes rather the bringing together of a collective that, while not physically or even temporally co-present, shares traits, practices, and/or purposes that go beyond national or familial identities. [↩]
4. Such activities are examined widely in scholarship. See, e.g., the essays in Katherine Allen Smith and Scott Wells, eds., Negotiating Community and Difference in Medieval Europe: Gender, Power, Patronage and the Authority of Religion in Latin Christendom (Leiden: Brill, 2009). [↩]
5. Elsie McKee, ed., Church Mother: The Writings of a Protestant Reformer in Sixteenth-Century Germany (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 43–6. [↩]
6. On the contrarian tendency of the academies, see Jane Everson and Lisa Sampson, “Introduction,” in The Italian Academies 1525–1700: Networks of Culture, Innovation and Dissent, eds. Jane E. Everson, Denis V. Reidy, and Lisa Sampson (Cambridge: Modern Humanities Research Association and Routledge, 2016), 6–7. [↩]
7. For discussion of the range of roles women adopted in the academies, see Virginia Cox, “Members, Muses, Mascots: Women and Italian Academies,” in Everson, Reidy, and Sampson, The Italian Academies, 132–69. Also, Cox, “Seen but Not Heard: The Role of Women Speakers in Cinquecento Literary Dialogue,” in Women in Italian Renaissance Culture and Society, ed. Letizia Panizza (Oxford: European Humanities Research Centre, 2000), 385–400. A different perspective is provided by Conor Fahy, who argues that the actual literary activity of women took place largely outside the activities of the academies; “Women and Italian Cinquecento literary academies,” in Panizza, Women in Italian Renaissance, 438–52. [↩]
8. Simone Testa, “The Italian Academic Movement and the Republic of Letters,” in Italian Academies and Their Networks, 1525–1700: From Local to Global (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 155–82. [↩]