Acknowledgments
This volume grew out of a two-day conference organized by the editors and held at the Rubenanium in Antwerp, Belgium, in 2015. The interdisciplinary event brought together twenty-six international scholars to present their current research on various aspects of women and gender in the early modern Low Countries, investigations whose subjects ranged from Dutch women playwrights and religious activists, to Flemish nuns and patrons of the arts, to gendered tropes in art and literature and women’s agency across the region. It was our hope to spark new conversations across disciplines and, in particular, across the historical and historiographical rift that often keeps separate scholarly discussions on the Northern Protestant United Provinces (the present-day Netherlands) from those on the Catholic South (roughly, Belgium and Luxembourg). Whatever success we found in this quest would not have been possible without the enthusiasm, creativity, and support of many others.
The editors first wish to express our indebtedness to all of the conference participants: our panel chairs Ellen Decraene, Lia van Gemert, Anne-Laure van Bruaene, Julie de Groot, Aaron Hyman, and Bert Watteeuw; panelists Mirjam de Baar, Manon van der Heijden, Frima Fox Hofrichter, Tine de Moor, Andrea Pearson, Patricia Stoop, Danielle van den Heuvel, Cordula van Wyhe, and Ping-Yuan Wang, all of whom made stimulating contributions with their papers. Panelists Martha Moffitt Peacock, Martine van Elk, Margit Thøfner, Katlijne Van der Stighelen, and our keynote speakers Martha Howell and Diane Wolfthal all too gave thought-provoking presentations and have joined us in creating this volume by contributing chapters as varied as they are thoughtfully researched and insightful. We thank the latter group for their commitment to the project as they stuck with us through rounds of editing and generously circulated their ideas.
It is also our pleasure to acknowledge others whose help and support have made this project possible, first and foremost Véronique van de Kerckhof, Director of the Rubenianum, for generously making the beautiful host venue available, and to herself and Bert Watteeuw, Lieneke Nijkamp, and Ute Staes for assisting with organization. Anne-Laure van Bruaene, Katlijne Van der Stighelen, and Luc Duerloo all served on the project’s steering committee as we sought funding, which was provided by the University of Antwerp, FWO Vlaanderen, and the King Baudouin Foundation. Luc Duerloo and Diane Wolfthal were also especially helpful in planning and making funding applications. Thanks also to research assistant, Brittany Smith, for helping with the preparation of the index. UNC Charlotte hosted our conference website and gave technical support, and Amanda Pipkin would also like to thank the University’s College of Liberal Arts and Science and Office of International Programs for offering travel funding. Sarah Moran would like to express her gratitude to the EURIAS program and the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study, where she wrote her chapter for this volume during a fellowship residency. And a very special thanks go to the staff at Brill, especially Ivo Romein and Arjan van Dijk, to the anonymous referees for their helpful comments, and to Andrew Gow for selecting our volume for the Studies in Medieval and Reformation Traditions series.
Last but not least, we would like to acknowledge the many museums and collections who provided visual material for this volume, and in particular those institutions who are leading the way towards making scholarly research more accessible by doing away with image rights fees; among them is the Saint Louis Art Museum, whose Account Keeper by Nicolaes Maes (1656) graces our cover. We began this project with the aim of continuing to pull back the curtains of historical erasure from early modern women by demonstrating, in a comprehensive and comparative way, that Low Countries women not only shaped the domestic sphere but also played enormously varied roles in a dynamic environment of economic, artistic, and cultural exchange, and furthermore by showing that the study of these women across the political and religious border created by the Dutch Revolt offers opportunities for novel and fundamental historical research. Maes’s Account Keeper speaks, we think, to both of these points, as well as to the complex intersections of representation and reality with which our authors grapple, and we are thus grateful that we could make it the ‘face’ of our collective work.
The painting presents a quiet interior in which a lone middle-aged woman, dressed modestly but well, sits bent over heavy ledgers, pen in hand and mouth slightly open as though talking to herself as she crunches the numbers. The size of the ledgers implies a large commercial undertaking, while the map hung on the wall behind her suggests a business with global interests.1 Though the exact historical meanings of the image are elusive, the Account Keeper engages in none of the negative stereotypes of femininity that are well-known to scholars but rather exudes female competence and right judgment, and speaks to the very ordinariness of women’s work in the ‘male’ spheres of money and trade in the Low Countries during this period. Moreover, the work itself is a product of movement across the North/South border, as Maes was a Dutch student of Rembrandt whose work was transformed during the time he spent in Antwerp studying the works of Flemish masters of the previous generation. And of course, we cannot help but see echoes of our own work as scholars in the account keeper’s diligent attention to her books, as we reckon with our own sources and try to come up with a fair accounting of the experiences of her contemporaries. It is our sincere hope that Women and Gender in the Early Modern Low Countries has shed some valuable light on its subjects, and that it will encourage both new research in this area and further exchange among scholars working across disciplinary and political borders.
For an introduction to the debate surrounding this painting see Basil Selig Yamey, Art and Accounting (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), 97–101.