Notes on Contributors
Martine van Elk
Martine van Elk is a Professor of English Literature at California State University Long Beach. In 2017, her book, Early Modern Women’s Writing: Domesticity, Privacy, and the Public Sphere in England and the Dutch Republic, was published by Palgrave. In addition, she has authored numerous journal articles and book chapters on Shakespeare, vagrancy, and early modern women writers in publications such as Shakespeare Quarterly, Studies in English Literature, and Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal, as well as a chapter on Terence in early modern England for Blackwell’s Companion to Terence (2013). She edited Gammer Gurton’s Needle for Broadview’s new Anthology of Medieval Drama (2012) and is co-editor of a collection of essays entitled Tudor Drama Before Shakespeare, 1485–1590, published by Palgrave in 2004. She is currently working on a comparative study of women on and behind the stage in England, France, and the Low Countries.
Martha Howell
Martha Howell, Miriam Champion Professor of History at Columbia University, specializes in social, economic, legal, and women’s history in Northern Europe during the late medieval and early modern centuries, concentrating on the Burgundian Netherlands, northern France, and Germany. She received her bachelor’s degree from Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., and both her MA and PhD from Columbia. Before joining the Columbia faculty in 1989 she taught at Rutgers University in New Jersey, and from 1989 to 1995 she served as Director of the University’s Institute for Research on Women and Gender. Professor Howell’s publications include Commerce before Capitalism in Europe, 1300–1600 (Cambridge, 2010); From Reliable Sources (with Walter Prevenier, Cornell University Press, 2001; and the German edition in 2004); Uit goede bron (with Marc Boone and Walter Prevenier, 2000); The Marriage Exchange: Property, Social Place and Gender in Cities of the Low Countries, 1300–1550 (University of Chicago Press, 1998); and Women, Production, and Patriarchy in Late Medieval Cities (University of Chicago Press, 1986). She is presently working on the culture of credit in Northern Europe during the late medieval and early modern period. In 2007, Professor Howell was awarded a doctorate of humane letters, honoris causa, from the University of Ghent, Belgium.
Martha Moffitt Peacock
Martha Moffitt Peacock is Professor of Art History at Brigham Young University. She received a bachelor’s degree from Brigham Young University and an MA and PhD from Ohio State University, Columbus. Her research centers on the relationship of art to the lives of women in the Dutch Republic, and her articles “Proverbial Reframing – Rebuking and Revering Women in Trousers” (Journal of the Walters Art Gallery, 1999), “Domesticity in the Public Sphere” (in Saints, Sinners, and Sisters. Gender and Northern Art in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, Ashgate, 2003), and “The Imaging and Economics of Women Consumers and Merchants in the Netherlandish Marketplace” (Urban Space, 2009) deal with themes of female empowerment through art. She has also published and presented on women artists such as Geertruydt Roghman, Anna Maria van Schurman, and Joanna Koerten. Professor Peacock has also published on Bosch and Rembrandt, contributing to and editing two exhibition catalogs on the prints of Rembrandt and his circle at B.Y.U.. Currently she is working on her book entitled Heroines, Harpies, and Housewives: Imaging Women of Consequence in the Dutch Golden Age.
Sarah Joan Moran
Sarah Joan Moran is Associate Professor of Art History at Utrecht University. She received her BA from Amherst College and her MA and PhD from Brown University, and her primary interests are in the roles of art and architecture in the Counter Reformation and in women’s patronage, viewership, and relationships to material culture. She has published several articles on these topics and her first book, Unconventual Women in the Habsburg Low Countries, 1585–1794: The Visual Culture of the Court Beguinages, will appear with the University of Amsterdam Press in early 2019. Dr. Moran is currently working on a new project on the domestic use of artworks in the Spanish Empire. Her research has been supported by the Fulbright Foundation, the Belgian American Educational Foundation, the Swiss National Science Foundation, and the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study.
Amanda Pipkin
Amanda Pipkin is Associate Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. She received a bachelor’s degree from Wake Forest University, an MA at the University of Leiden, and a PhD from Rutgers University, the State University of New Jersey. Her book, Rape in the Republic, 1609–1725: Formulating Dutch Identity (Brill, 2013), reveals the significance of sex and gender in the construction of Dutch identity during the period of the Revolt of the Netherlands and beyond by examining depictions of rape in pamphlets, plays, poems, and advice manuals. She has also published articles on seventeenth-century Dutch culture in the Journal of Early Modern History and in Tijdschrijft voor Geschiedenis. Her new book-length project highlights women’s contributions to the spread of the Reformed faith across Europe from 1550–1700, by detailing their teachings, efforts to convert unbelievers, organization of informal church services, participation in international debate, and encouragement of their fellow Calvinists abroad.
Margit Thøfner
Margit Thøfner was born and educated in Denmark before pursuing her BA and MA in art history at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London and her PhD at the University of Sussex, which she completed in 1996. She taught at the Universities of St. Andrews and Bristol before being appointed Senior Lecturer in the Department of Art History and World Art Studies at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England, where she worked from 2000 until 2015. Having now escaped academic wage-slavery, she is a freelance researcher who, amongst other things, serves as the reviews editor for Art History. Margit has published a number of articles on the representation of women in the Southern Netherlands and, more broadly, on public ceremonial and religious artworks. Her book A Common Art: Urban Ceremonial in Antwerp and Brussels during and after the Dutch Revolt appeared in 2007. Currently she is working on the connections between religious art and music in Germany and the Low Countries during the early modern period.
Katlijne Van der Stighelen
Katlijne Van der Stighelen is Professor of Art History at the University of Leuven (KU Leuven), where she received her PhD in 1988. Between 1984 and 1994 she worked as a Research Fellow and a Senior Research Fellow of the Belgian National Fund for Scientific Research. In 1994 she was appointed Associate Professor at both the University of Antwerp and at the University of Leuven, and in 2001 she was appointed Professor Ordinarius at the latter. She has published books on Anna Maria van Schurman (1607–1678), on the Antwerp painter Cornelis de Vos (1584/85–1651), on Anthony van Dyck (1599–1641) and on the tradition of Flemish portraiture. In addition she has published widely on many aspects of Flemish art and female artistry in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In the Fall of 2002 she was holder of the Rubens Chair at the University of California Berkeley. Together with Hans Vlieghe she is currently the editor of the series Pictura Nova. Studies in 16th- and 17th-Century Flemish Painting and Drawing (Brepols).
Diane Wolfthal
Diane Wolfthal is David and Caroline Minter Endowed Chair in the Humanities and Professor of Art History, Rice University. She specializes in late medieval and early modern European art. Her interests include feminist and gender studies, Jewish studies, the history of sexuality, technical art history, and the study of the intersection of money, values, and culture. Her authored books include In and Out of the Marital Bed: Seeing Sex in Renaissance Art (Yale University Press, 2010), Picturing Yiddish: Gender, Identity, and Memory in Illustrated Yiddish Books of Renaissance Italy (Leiden: Brill, 2004), Images of Rape: The “Heroic” Tradition and its Alternatives (Cambridge University Press, 1999), and The Beginnings of Netherlandish Canvas Painting (Cambridge, 1989). She co-authored Princes and Paupers: The Art of Jacques Callot (Yale, 2013) and Corpus of Fifteenth-Century Painting in the Southern Netherlands and the Principality of Liège: Early Netherlandish Paintings in Los Angeles (Brussels, KIK-IRPA, 2014). She has also edited or co-edited collections of essays on the family, peace and negotiation, the rise of the monetary economy and its effect on European culture, and a Festschrift for Colin Eisler. She is a Founding Co-editor of Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal. Her major current projects are Household Help: Servants and Slaves in Europe and Abroad, under contract to Yale University Press, and an exhibition, Medieval Money, at the Morgan Library and Museum.