The rise of humanist studies in the Western world brought with it the Respublica litteraria,1 an intellectual community, real and imagined, crossing over time, social, and geographical boundaries, along with publications of a similar kind.2 Latin would remain the lingua franca. Yet, from the start in the fifteenth century, the rise in the learned use of vernacular languages made possible a new, more inclusive discourse about the literary act and its place in society. The advent of print fuelled the commercialization of literary products, by men and by women, which increased, particularly, in the seventeenth century.3 Such changes were initially influenced by Dante, who considered the vernacular as universal, and by Petrarch, who justified it by placing it in a classical context. Boccaccio’s first edition of Dante’s works also acted as a defence of vernacular poetry, and he transcribed the earliest redaction of Petrarch’s vernacular collection.4 Christine de Pizan, moreover, exemplified the humanist fascination with Graeco-Roman ancient culture from the conscious stance of a female author, in works that became key in the Querelle des femmes literary debate. Here is how Pizan fashioned Sappho:
Remarquablement écrits et composés, ses œuvres et poèmes sont parvenus jusqu’à nous, et demeurent des modèles d’inspiration pour les poètes et écrivains assoiffés de perfection. Sapho inventa plusieurs genres lyriques et poétiques: lais et dolentes élégies, curieux chants d’amour désespéré et autres poèmes lyriques d’inspiration différente, qui furent appelés saphiques pour l’excellence de leur prosodie. Horace rappelle à ce sujet qu`à la mort de Platon, ce très grand philosophe et le maître même d’Aristote, on trouva sous son oreiller un recueil des poèmes de Sapho.5
Her [Sappho] writings and poems have survived to this day, most remarkably constructed and composed, and they serve as illumination and models of consummate poetic craft and composition to those who have come afterward. She invented various lyrical and poetical genres, short narratives, tearful laments and strange lamentations about love and other emotions, which were so well made and so well ordered that these were named ‘Sapphic’ after her. Horace recounts, concerning her poems, that when Plato, the great philosopher who was Aristotle’s teacher, died, a book of Sappho’s poems was found under his pillow.
Pizan admits to learning about her through Boccaccio (presumably, De claris mulieribus), but Sappho had also served as an authoritative model for Catullus, Horace, Ovid, and Isidore of Seville (in Etymologiae; Libri XX, 1.39.7) – the Etymologiae’s Augsburg editio princeps of 1472 stands as one of the earliest incunables.6 Leonardo Bruni, another best-selling author and model for humanists, recalls her authority to defend women’s study of rhetoric in De studiis et litteris (ca. 1405–1429), whose print editions date from 1472.7 Sappho’s ‘Ode to Aphrodite’, furthermore, was printed within Dionysius’s De compositione verborum (XXIII) by Aldus Manutius in Venice in 1508, and again in 1556, this time in France by Henri Estienne as part of her “complete” work. Fragment 31 (‘He is a god to me’), for its part, appeared twice in 1554: first, in Basel by the scholar Francesco Robortello (in the pseudo-Longinian treatise On the Sublime), and then, in Venice by Marc-Antoine Muret (in his Catullus, et in eum commentaries M. Antonii Mureti); and for the first time in the vernacular, in 1556 by André Wechel (in Rémi Belleau’s French translation of Anacreon’s odes).8 Sappho’s model was still being invoked and celebrated for its auctoritas, alongside modern female ones,9 throughout the seventeenth century: in her English translation of Book VI of Abraham Cowley’s Plantarum libri sex (London, 1668), Aphra Behn added three verses (not in the original Latin) to Cowley’s on the laurel wreath, singling out in a footnote that, in such verses, ‘the translatress in her own person speaks’ (‘Let me with Sappho and Orinda [Katherine Philips] be, / Oh ever Sacred Nymph, adorn’d by thee; / And give my verses Immortality’).10 The tendency to take Sappho and other ancient women (i.e. Corinna and Aspasia) as models by and for learned women publicly, in fact, mirrors the male models of Virgil or Horace. By celebrating and reinforcing, in their own times, a sense of shared memories and of a common past, learned women and their peers document a group identity within the Respublica litteraria, as well as a reference frame of female literary agency.11
This chapter, therefore, reflects on the relation of scholarly identity, collective memory, and gender12 from an interdisciplinary, comparative perspective by focusing on published texts by Luisa Sigea (1522–1560) and Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle (1623–1673). The aim is to illuminate the position of women within the learned world by interrogating secular self-fashioning and publishing strategies before and after the major commercialization of literature in the first four decades of the seventeenth century: to reconstruct the real place of any group identity within intellectual memory, we need to turn to the literary and material form(s) of their contributions.13
1 Luisa Sigea (1522–1560): Scholarly Identity in the Sixteenth Century
On 15 March 1551, Luisa Sigea addressed a Latin epistle to Pompeyo Zambecari, Bishop of Sulmona, then also apostolic nuncio in Lisbon. The epistle opens with a quotation that she attributes to Cicero (she evidently cites from memory, because the source is actually from Quintilian), conceding the idea that one’s true thoughts never hide behind eloquent words.14 The epistle, in fact, shows her effort to attract sincere intellectual praise, one of the strongest stimulants to a passion for literature, and mentoring, after reaching renown as a polyglot through intellectual exchanges in person, correspondence, and publication:
Vidisti igitur heri quantum ab illa tua de me concepta opinione degenerem, quantumque a linguarum peritia qua me pollere audieras, cum nihil non plane rusticum atque obsoletum coram te dixerim. Nec me solatur benignitas qua in me commendanda es usus, cum abjectos aut submittentes se libenter allevemus, quia hoc facere tanquam majores videmur; et quoties discessit aemulatio succedit humanitas. Vellem potius talem me in vena exhibuisse talemque esse ut te timerem aemulum quam jactarem inscitiae meae habere defensorem.15
You saw yesterday how unworthy I showed myself of the opinion that you have of me and of my knowledge of languages – to which, according to what you had heard, I owed my renown – for everything I said in your presence was utterly clumsy and vulgar. And I find no consolation in the kindness that you employed to instil confidence in me, for we elevate the humiliated and the fallen voluntarily only because that gesture seems to make us feel better about ourselves. For, as soon as rivalry disappears, humanity follows. I wish I had shown to have such talent of myself and to be such to fear you as a rival, rather than to boast that I had you as a defender of my clumsiness.
To this end, Sigea stresses the role of rivalry in the pursuit of knowledge and the solace one finds in knowing that friendship develops from sharing values and intellectual practices; she also underlines being occupied by some serious writing. Crucially, the epistle concludes with a note of gratitude and a promise to be forever obliging, rooted in first-hand experience: Sigea thanks Zambecari for sending her a book by Vittoria Colonna, which she admits to appreciating more than light itself, both because of its author and its donor.
Sigea made not a single reference to her sex in this Latin epistle. That a woman humanist found her female condition irrelevant in an appeal for intellectual mentoring, in such an ‘intimately theatrical’ form,16 is of the utmost importance. It dismantles several preconceived ideas about women and the learned world: neither criticism nor the use of masculine generic linguistic terms, even in Latin (i.e. ‘viri’), precluded Sigea from identifying with experiences depicted in male-authored texts, which substantiates the existence, power, and scope of ideologies other than patriarchal at the time.17 One vital finding of cognitive research on gender is the connection between raising consciousness and having schemata for a female perspective in literature; another, that a simple instruction to consider something differently can induce a change in a female reader’s outlook on that same thing.18 A case in point is Erasmus’s colloquy Abbatis et eruditae (Basel, 1524), which positively addresses the question, practices, and marital experiences of learned women as a contemporary social phenomenon in Spain, Italy, England, and Germany.19 In short, Renaissance20 learned women knew they could be considered on an equal footing to their male peers, thereby confirming that positive symbolic constructions about them – i.e. via factual paratexts: name, sex, hometown, cultural practices – 21 helped shifting readers’ outlooks on women’s intellectual worth more thoroughly than has been thought.
Women’s agency to act independently and exert authority from a female perspective22 in the Respublica litteraria was increasingly exemplified by those who, like Sigea, ‘formed intellectual relationships with men and were invited to participate in humanist life and practices’.23 In her humanist epistle, Sigea mentions Vittoria Colonna, Marchioness of Pescara, a poet in the Petrarchan tradition and an author of prose works, first written as epistles, who like Christine de Pizan, found success through vernacular manuscript. Colonna actively promoted the publication of Castiglione’s Il Cortegiano (Venice, 1528), a social treatise that rapidly became an European best-seller, proving instrumental for the consolidation of women’s secular authorship across borders: drawing on ancient and modern history, Castiglione prescribes a theoretical and practical view of female courtiers that closely matches that of the male courtier.24 Colonna’s Rime de la Divina Vittoria Colonna, Marchesa di Pescara (Parma, 1538) was printed, in the sixteenth century alone, nineteen times, twelve during the author’s lifetime.25 This success stimulated the rising number of publishing women during the sixteenth century across borders – in England, for instance, she may have influenced Aemilia Lanyer.26
Not only was she perceived as an equal to the finest male poets of her age, but Colonna’s consecration as an author also promoted a model for legitimate literary expression by secular women and a canon of female voices she herself headed.27 Such self-authorization strategies built on those of Boccaccio and Christine de Pizan: in the Introduction to Day 4 of the Decamerone (ca. 1353), Boccaccio places himself in a community of modern vernacular poets under the pretext ‘to defend [their] continued love for the ladies’; his larger strategy was to authorize himself by canonizing others.28
Poetry was regarded as the literary art par excellence.29 Colonna herself developed as an author through writing verse – Sappho’s recognized expertise –, and this is representative of the early modern period across Europe. So is that she was labelled a ‘Tenth Muse’, the title Plato accorded to Sappho for her superb literary skills, which turned her into an authoritative model: in Phaedrus, for instance, Sappho is used by Socrates as an authority to support his criticism of Lysias’s speech on love.30 Indeed, many Renaissance and Baroque learned women were adorned with ancient names (i.e. Sappho, Corinna, and Minerva)31 and titles (‘Tenth Muse’, ‘Fourth Grace’), based on Plato’s authority and intent, and later those of his leading followers (i.e. Garcilaso de la Vega):
En los antiguos fue frequente llamar a las Damas doctas Décima Musa, o quarta Gracia […]. Assí llamò Platón lib.1. Anthol. a Sappho Poetria de Grecia. Sappho Pierÿs est Decima […]. Y nuestro Garci-Lasso en el Soneto 24. a la Marquesa de la Padula […], Décima moradora del Parnaso. / Yo di el mismo atributo a […] FENISA Dama q[ue] en este siglo merece ser referida con quantas acuerda la fama.
Among the ancient it became customary to call learned Ladies Tenth Muse, or fourth Grace […]. This is how Plato called Sappho Poetria of Greece lib.1. Anthol.. Sappho Pierÿs est Decima […]. So did our Garcilaso [de la Vega] in Sonnet 24 regarding the Marchioness of Padula […], Tenth dweller of the Parnassus. / I gave the same attribute to […] FENISA, a Lady, who in this century deserves to be recalled along with those fame concurs.32
Again, this echoed practices applied to learned men: in his depiction of Petrarch, Boccaccio’s use of epithets draws on the concept of the vir illustris, transmitted from Roman antiquity and based on the idea of coincidence of virtue and fame; in the seventeenth century, this also manifests in the presentation of authors as equivalents to ancient and the “first” modern authorities, both implicitly and explicitly (i.e. Lope de Vega as Virgil, Petrarch, and Garcilaso; Ben Jonson as ‘the English Horace, Martial’).33 In both cases, the practice was financially worthwhile, too, given its special recurrence in the paratextual apparatus of print publications throughout the period, even when concerning religious authors (i.e. Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz), precisely because this difference helped the publication to stand out.34
Luisa Sigea was also celebrated as a ‘Tenth Muse’ during her lifetime, an authoritative intellectual status, which was notably enlarged by the papal support she had; in 1546, she sent Pope Paulus III a Latin epistle (she had also done so in 1540), accompanied by a copy of her first work, Sintra, to which he responded positively in 1547.35 Sintra (c. 1546) is an ode, which shows a ‘structural similarity’ with Sappho’s ‘Ode to Aphrodite’.36 Specifically, it is a bucolic evocation in verse (with four epigrams) of the royal gardens of Sintra, Portugal, wherein a lake nymph addresses the humanist author by her name: Sigea is sitting nearby, and the nymph prophesizes on the fortunate future of Mary of Portugal, Duchess of Viseu, Sigea’s very own patron and the richest woman in Renaissance Europe. Sigea and her sister were tutored by their Flemish father, Diego Sigeo, as did later the children of the fourth duke of Braganza; in 1542 Rainha Catherine of Austria, wife of John III of Portugal, invited Sigea to become a lady-in-waiting at her court, and soon she and her sister began to serve the Infanta Mary of Portugal, as her Latin and music tutors. Indeed, a number of payments are recorded in Livro de moradia of Rainha Catherine for “donna Luisa de Sygea, latina”.37 The term latina could simply refer to learned ladies at court.38 Nonetheless, prioritising women’s roles as teachers in female education had a long tradition at Portuguese courts, notably shown by their female patronage of two Portuguese translations of Pizan’s Le Livre des trois vertus à l’enseignement des dames.39 In Sigea’s case, this role is deemed as factual (not verisimilar) in several contemporary letters and in a seventeenth-century biography of the Infanta.40
This promotion of gender complicity becomes all the more significant when considering that Sigea reached international renown as a humanist authority and a scholar,41 linked to the Infanta’s ‘Universidade Femenina [Female University]’,42 as her literary academy was known. The phrase was perhaps inspired by women’s attested connections with universities in Iberia and elsewhere,43 or indeed, by Pizan’s gendered discourse: in the Portuguese translations of her treatise on women’s education – its print version, O Espelho de Cristina (Lisbon, 1518), was commissioned by the Infanta’s aunt, Rainha Eleanor of Viseu – , Pizan addresses her readers as ‘colegio feminino [women’s college]’ and as ‘universidade das mulheres [women’s university]’.44 In this regard, Erasmus’s influence may have played a part, too: in his colloquy Senatulus (1528), five female characters, bearing ancient and modern names (Cornelia, Margareta, Perotta, Julia, and Catarina), plan to form a women-only council and engage in public debates concerning women’s lives.45
A year after addressing her epistle to Zambecari, Sigea married Francisco de Cuevas, an untitled noble, and completed her other major extant work, Duarum virginum colloquium de vita aulica et privata (c. 1552; its dedication dates from 1553), in prose and dialogue form, drawing on Plato, Plutarch, Cicero, Seneca, St Augustin, Petrarch, and Erasmus – in Phaedrus, as we remember, Socrates marshalled Sappho as an authority. In her colloquy, two young learned women (Flaminia and Blesilla) debate whether a public life at court is better than a private one in retirement within city walls, favouring the latter. It is, therefore, a small yet significant variation – it is based on gender – on the old debate between the active and the contemplative life with regards to the attainment of happiness.46
In her epistles, poetry, prose, and dialogues, Sigea represented a female voice in Latin to underscore her authority as a scholar, upholding the sense of friendship and camaraderie of the Respublica litteraria.47 The dedications to her female patron served this purpose, too, since her ‘social respectability’48 as a humanist, like Petrarch’s, depended on patronage. In all such writings, Sigea exploited seemingly personal circumstances – being a learned woman was one – for the captatio benevolentiae, such as in the purportedly Ciceronian (in fact, Quintilian) quotation in the opening of the epistle addressed to Zambecari.49 Such efforts helped in her construction of an auctoritas suitable for the times: certainly, with her chosen signature ‘Per Loysam Sygeam Toletanam’ emulating others (i.e. ‘Per Des. Erasmus Roterodamus’), Sigea fashioned herself as a known, recognizable, and confident scholarly woman author (‘utility and novelty’),50 born to a learned, middle-class family of Flemish and Spanish origin, connected with Toledo (Charles V’s main residence) and Portuguese courts.51 In Johannes Vasaeus’s Chronici rerum memorabilium Hispaniae (Salamanca, 1552),52 for instance, Sigea (and her sister) is praised as a contemporary learned referent of ‘puellas aliquot & mulieres’ across nations with supportive fathers: the preliminaries include a laudatory poem by Francisco Sánchez de las Brozas, known as El Brocense, famous to this day for his editions and translations of classical and modern works. In 1553, she was praised alongside Aspasia, Sappho, the daughters of Thomas More, Angela of Foligno, Catherine of Siena, and Vittoria Colonna, in a French print publication by Guillaume Postel on the most admirable victories of modern women, dedicated to Margaret of Valois, who was born that year. Learned women as a group must have felt most appreciated, especially when reading about Sigea’s accomplishments in the name of women – ‘à la Femme n’est rien impossible’ [for a woman, nothing is impossible], as Postel added.53 But also when any such celebrated women allegedly experienced envy-driven ridicule and this was publicly undermined on gender and humanistic (erasmian) grounds:
But these men that so saye do in my jugement eyther regarde but lytell what they speke in this mater or els as they be for the more parte unlerned they envy it and take it sore to hert, that the other shulde have that precious jewell whiche they nother have theym selfe nor can fynde in their hertes to take the payne to gette […]. I suppose nowe a dayes a man coude nat devyse a better waye to kepe his wyfe safe […] than if he teche her the latyn and greke tonge and suche good sciences as are written in them.54
Two key examples are the vernacular publications of Gaspara Stampa and Louise Labé, which appeared shortly after that of Postel and those including Sappho’s Fragment 31, as the products of ‘Tenth Muses’ (i.e. ‘Saffo de nostri giorni’, Sappho of our times)55 – Stampa’s book was published posthumously in Venice, but Labé’s collected works appeared in Lyon during her lifetime, following humanistic practices (i.e. ‘par Lovïze Labé lionnoize’).56
In 1557, when their daughter was born, Sigea and her husband secured positions at the Valladolid court of Reina Mary of Hungary and Bohemia, sister of Charles V and an Erasmus’s correspondent, including the dedicatee of his De vidua christiana (Basel, 1529). A year later, she was praised as a ‘Tenth Muse’ in Salvador Solano’s Poetica (Salamanca, 1558), whose preliminaries again include a laudatory poem by El Brocense.57 In 1559, while living on two pensions left to them by the late Reina Mary, Sigea sent a Latin epistle, in the form of a curriculum vitae, to Philip II of Spain, stressing her teaching work for the Infanta Mary of Portugal and her singularity as the then most celebrated woman scholar: Sigea’s confidence may have seemed plausible enough, since print works (i.e. Domenichi’s all-women anthology, containing fifty-three women poets, Colonna and Stampa among them, was published then in Lucca) increasingly showcased learned women ‘as active in literary coteries, urban networks of literary women and men, and the republic of letters in general’.58 Around this time, too, her husband requested employment in writing for both, on the basis of a lack of funds and their former work; he as secretary and she ‘por las habilidades que tiene y por haber enseñado a la Infanta de Portugal’ [for the abilities she has and for having taught the Infanta of Portugal].59 On 1 February 1560, again to no avail, Sigea applied for a position – based on shared intellectual interests – at the court of Elisabeth of Valois, a sister of Postel’s dedicatee, and the king’s wife (since 1559) via Sébastien de l’Aubespine, the French ambassador. Sigea died months later.60
Philip II conceded a life-long pension to Públia Hortênsia de Castro (1548–1595), another female humanist linked to Rainha Catherine’s Portuguese court, however. Furthermore, when Sigea approached him for work, Sofonisba Anguissola had just (in 1559) been appointed to serve his young wife as ‘artista de compañía’ [a lady-in-waiting and a painting teacher]: Anguissola stayed with Reina Elisabeth until 1573.61 In her epistle to de l’Aubespine, Sigea speaks of patronage struggles as a societal problem in Spain, which she also exploits for aesthetic purposes in her vernacular poetry. Curiously, in the preface to his revised Part III of Le Vite (Florence, 1568), Giorgio Vasari dwells on such patronage struggles in Italy, too, while including a life and a portrait of the sculptor Properzia de’ Rossi, as well as references to the Spanish court’s appreciation of Anguissola.62 In other words, Sigea’s late frustration seems to have referred to her milieu, in which poets and artists alike struggled to climb the social hierarchy, rather than to personal (gender) reasons.63
Sintra was printed in 1566 by Denis du Pré in Paris. The paratextual apparatus includes Sigea’s epistle to Pope Paulus III, laudatory poems by Portuguese and Italian humanists – Jorge Coelho (who compares her to Sappho), Gaspar Barreiros, André de Resende, Girolamo Britonio, and Claudio Monselli –, and two epistles on the printing arrangement that existed since October 1561 between her father and Jean Nicot, the French ambassador in Lisbon. In short, the print version documents a concerted effort to preserve and capitalize on Sigea’s singularity, memory, and fame in Spain, France, and Italy. Below is Nicot’s epistle to Sigea’s father, Diego Sigeo:
Eccum tibi, mi Sygaee, Aloysiae tuae carmen […]. Nunc ad te redit ornatum Cl[audii]. Monselli peritissimi viri commendatione. Tu cura, ut Infans Maria, quid judicium de ejus alumna in Gallia factum fuerit, id vero intelligat. Aloysia, Sygaee, ex te denuo nascitur: immo vero prorsus numquam interiit. Vivet autem saeculis innumerabilibus hoc pulcherrimarum artium, quas illa studiosissime coluit, adjumento; ac tanquam fax nunc magis accensa non Hispanas modo feminas, sed ceteras quasvis etiam incredibile litterarum amore inflammabit.64
Here is for you, my Sigeo, the poem of your Luisa […]. I am returning it now with the recommendation [and praises] of Claudio Monsello, the most outstanding expert in oratory. Do as much as you can so that Infanta Dona Maria appreciates this opinion for what it is worth, for never before had it been held in France a judgment of such calibre regarding a lady-in-waiting of hers. Luisa, dear Sigeo, is born once again thanks to you, although, in all truth, she had never died completely. She shall live for countless centuries thanks to the exquisite beauty of those arts that she cultivated with such great zeal. And now, like a torch, still all the more burning, she will set alight Spanish women and on all the others, with her wondrous love for the Letters.
2 Margaret Cavendish (1623–1673): Scholarly Identity in the Seventeenth Century
The endeavours of learned women continued to be celebrated as belonging to a group identity within the Respublica litteraria over the following century –i.e. Ribera’s Le Glorie inmortali de Trionfi, et Heroiche Imprese D’ottocento quarantacinque Donne Illustri antiche e moderne (Venice, 1609) –, despite the occasional male ridicule, which continued to materialize in self-evident envy and/or literary banter. Furthermore, the old idea that the Respublica litteraria was formed by all the writers ‘of all ages’ and ‘of all countries’ resurfaced then in institutional, categorizable forms (i.e. dictionaries, catalogues), projecting dreams of social organization, liberty, and equality.65 One such example is the third volume of Schottus’s Hispaniae Bibliotheca (Frankfurt, 1608), which references (under the epigraph, ‘POETRIAE ET FOEMINAE HISPANIAE / eruditione clara’) sixteenth-century female humanists of international renown (i.e. Luisa Sigea, Oliva Sabuco de Nantes, and Juliana Morell), as well as the self-proclaimed unlearned, St Teresa, whose Vida in English translation would circulate from 1611.66 Similarly, when acknowledging Sigea’s intellectual contributions in Louis Moréri’s Le Grand Dictionaire Historique (Paris, 1681), her seventeenth-century French ridicule is put to an end immediately: ‘Mais l’Ouvrage qu’on a publié sous son nom De arcarnis Amoris & Veneris est plus moderne’ [But the work that has been published under her name, De arcanis Amoris & Veneris, is more modern].67 The seventeenth-century Respublica litteraria also projected dreams of profit. Indeed, despite ongoing criticism – allegedly, for being improper and for degrading one’s art – , the commercialization of the literary product during this century brought with it the professionalization of the writer’s career and a greater, more prominent role on the part of the (printer-)publisher in the publishing enterprise, making print and vernacular languages the favourite tools for dissemination.68 The transnational circulation of Bartoli’s Dell’Huomo di lettere difeso et emendato Parti due (Rome, 1645) bears witness to some of these changes (‘It is a How to of starting the work of writing’ in the Baroque),69 both in terms of content and material form: ‘Do you realize that through the press you are speaking, not to a hundred, or a thousand, but to all the sages of the world as your reading audience?’,70 asks Bartoli in the English translation (London, 1660), whose title page defensively insists on ‘the right of the Muses’ via Latin quotations from Aristotle, Seneca, and Sabellico; the Spanish one (Madrid, 1678) highlights its original language and existing vernacular translations (Latin, French, English, German, and Portuguese), while the censor authorizing it claims to choose print ‘para hazer mas universal’ [to make it more universal].71
Authorial ambivalence, such as when a commercial author also makes self-negating statements (‘this incorrect Essay, written in the Country without the help of Books, or advice of Friends’),72 was certainly accentuated by the implied economics of print production and the rapid rise of common readers. Yet the struggle to invent an acceptable ethos was not new: to avoid being accused of vanity, Petrarch already presented himself as critical of his vernacular achievements, also via the category of the wondrous and miraculous.73 Seventeenth-century vernacular works often make novel claims, evince a disdain for pedantry, while evoking the idea of genius, or the naturally learned – hence the popular (albeit often misunderstood) practice of calling an author a ‘miracle’, a ‘monster of nature’, and ‘Phoenix’.74 Furthermore, their paratexts – many in epistolary form – increasingly served as an important locus for self-promotion, often dressed as readings on religious, philosophical, and societal matters, such as the inspiration and encouragement learned women and men (i.e. Marie de Gournay and Ben Jonson)75 found in ancient and modern sources. In the case of women, this was fuelled by their rising roles in printing houses – a trade ‘profoundly dependent’76 on kinship, marriage, and the representation of domesticity – since roughly 1557 in London, or even from an earlier period onward, in Antwerp, Louvain, and Douai.77
Take, for instance, Margaret Cavendish’s words, below. She references the relation between the theory of humours and one’s desire for contributing to cultural memory through intellectual fame and generic masculine terms (men and he) in vernacular print. Once again, this indicates an appreciation of literary conventions as embodying universal values and experiences, with which her book producers clearly concurred:
But there is no humor or passion so troublesome as desire, because it yields no sound satisfaction. For it is mixed most commonly with pleasing hopes, and hope is a greater pleasure than enjoyment […]. But desire and curiosity make a man to be above other creatures […]. And man, as he hath a transcendent soul to outlive the world to all eternity, so he hath a transcendent desire to live in the world’s memory as long as the world lasts […] that his works may beget another soul, though of shorter life, which is fame: for fame is like a soul, an incorporeal being.78
The passage is part of the preface, ‘Of Moral Philosophy and Moralists’, included in a single-authored publication, which appeared in folio in London in early 1653, subtly echoing the discipline of philosophy through the title (Poems and Fancies), authorial characterization (‘by the right honourable, the Lady Margaret countesse of Newcastle’), the printer (Thomas Roycroft, who had recently printed Thomas Hobbes’s De corpore politico), and the booksellers (Martyn and Allestry, the official publisher for the Royal Society from 1660).79 In fact, the publication has been described as a ‘conversation with Lucretius’s De rerum natura’, which somewhat presumes readers familiarity with that work.80
Poems and Fancies illustrates how a mid-seventeenth-century vernacular female author, aided by her distinguished book producers,81 strived to fashion a scholarly identity to suit the demands of an increasingly nationalistic, diverse, even aggressive, reading public.82 It contains 280 self-identified philosophical poems (i.e. ‘A Dialogue betwixt the Body and the Mind’),83 divided into five parts and brought to a close by a prose parable (The Animal Parliament) and a conclusion in the form of four poems. Dividing a work into various parts for having more dedicatees was not an innovation (i.e. Erasmus, Gessner), but in the seventeenth century this was also used for targeting different audiences more closely and at once.84 The six parts of Cavendish’s Poems and Fancies are intended for several interpretative communities: noble and worthy ladies, the common reader, natural philosophers, poets, writing ladies, and valiant soldiers.
Part 1, for instance, opens with a laudatory poem by the author’s husband, William Cavendish, then Marquis of Newcastle. In it, the countess (now referred to as duchess) is praised as a highly-regarded noble poet for managing to rob Spenser, Jonson, and Shakespeare of their ‘glorious fame’.85 This praise overtly situates the work within seventeenth-century courtly and commercial vernacular production by leading male poets, with pedagogical and philosophical (humanistic) ambitions – Spenser achieved a status equal to the Greek and Latin authorities (‘our English Virgil’),86 Shakespeare did similarly within the dramatic tradition, while Jonson, ‘the most learned and judicious Poet’,87 succeeded through wide-ranging compositions, encompassing the comedy of humours and the commonplace book.88 Such a strategy may have seemed reasonable enough, since the author wrote in the vernacular, was naturally learned (like Shakespeare, according to contemporary sources),89 with great intellectual ambitions (‘there are poetical fictions, moral instructions, philosophical opinions, dialogues, discourses, poetical romances’)90 – not to mention her husband was a courtier, a literary patron (i.e. for Jonson), and a poet himself.91
A dedication to her ‘Noble Brother-in-Law’, Sir Charles, signed by her initials (‘M.N.’), follows, wherein the author humorously undermines women’s traditional practices (‘spinning with fingers’), to emphasize the power of her natural inclination to study and write poetry (‘spinning with the brain’). Here, readers are directly confronted with her ambition to become a cultural icon: ‘I made my delight in the latter […], which made me endeavor to spin a garment of memory to lap up my name, that it might grow in after-ages’.92 Such paratexts had a commercial purpose – women authors had been self-identifying as ‘learned wives, mothers, and equal partners in their household salons’ from the late sixteenth century.93 The author’s husband (since December 1645), like Sir Charles, his younger brother, had links with renowned philosophers (i.e. Thomas Hobbes, René Descartes, Pierre Gassendi). By advertising learning within the family, ‘Margaret Newcastle’ hoped to reinforce a scholarly reading of her first printed work, and rightly so – the staged situation resonated with the learned woman’s supportive marital experiences described in Erasmus’s colloquy Abbatis et eruditae, while the literary work itself also conversed with seventeenth-century scientific thought (i.e. Thomas Hobbes and William Davenant).94
In ‘All Noble and Worthy Ladies’, Cavendish states that she prefers the approval of women, allegedly the largest interpretative community, because she writes in verse, a practice most akin with women, and fame derives from great noise.95 Such authorial claims reinforced and celebrated lettered women as a powerful group within the learned world: in seventeenth-century Italy, for instance, women’s power as an audience extended to the dissemination and authorization of scientific theory.96 Ultimately, the claims served to commercialize the work under the pretext of protecting her authorial reputation by targeting the authoritative interpretive community she represented, one firmly rooted in intellectual memory – the author’s characterization in the title page already echoes those of Colonna in Rime and Wroth’s Urania, for example. Hence Cavendish only recalls, in a vague manner (i.e. Mary Wroth is not named), women’s responses as authors and as literary characters to public disputes:
Therefore, pray strengthen my side in defending my books, for I know women’s tongues are as sharp as two-edged swords and wound as much when they are angered. And in this battle, may your wit be quick, and your speech ready, and your arguments so strong as to beat them out of the field of dispute. So shall I get honor and reputation by your favours; otherwise, I may chance to be cast into the fire. But if I burn, I desire to die your martyr; if I live, to be / Your humble servant, / M. N.97
This gender complicity (for ‘arousing their feelings’),98 invested in women’s publications, proved worthwhile within the fifteenth-century Querelle des femmes literary debate and thereafter. For instance, Chaine of Pearle (London, 1630), with which Cavendish and her book producers may have been familiar (The Animal Parliament draws on Elizabeth I, for instance),99 is overly promoted on class and gender grounds via its (full) title, author (Lady Diana Primrose), and audience’s stance – it includes two dedications, ‘To All Noble Ladies, and Gentle-Women’ and ‘To the Excellent Lady, the Composer of this Worke’, signed by the author and some Dorothy Berry, respectively.100 Similar practices could also be found elsewhere. In the late 1630s and 1640s, gender complicity famously served María de Zayas, held as a ‘Tenth Muse’, a ‘miracle’, and a ‘new Safo’, within the business of prose fiction: Aphra Behn would also achieve great success by following suit later in the century.101
The commercial importance of female authors to attract a female readership also explains the continuous role of women (in Iberia, since roughly 1588) in the print promotion of male-authored works: Zayas, for instance, was able to take on this role thirteen years before she had her first major work (a volume of novellas) printed, concerning Pérez de Montalbán’s Orfeo en lengua castellana (Madrid, 1624), for which she joined Lope de Vega and Tirso de Molina, among others.
And the array of paratexts of Poems and Fancies continues in a concerted effort to provide grounds for Cavendish’s novel contribution to the female group identity and literary agency, established in Antiquity. Accordingly, a letter-epistle to Lady Elizabeth Toppe is then presented, along with her response, to lend credibility to the enterprise by suggesting that an intellectual friend judged and censured the volume prior to its publication.102 Such paratexts also serve to underline Cavendish’s embodiment of the old idea of coincidence between virtue and fame (‘it is part of honor to aspire towards fame’) and natural singularity (‘you were always circumspect by nature, not by art’) within English letters: ‘You are not only the first English poet of your sex, but the first that ever wrote this way. Therefore, whosoever write afterwards must own you for their pattern’.103 Here, too, past readings (i.e. Pizan’s on Sappho) and self-promotional conventions, both in classical (i.e. Virgil in Eglogue VI) and modern authors (i.e. Boccaccio, Sannazaro, Cervantes, Zayas, and Jonson), were echoed and followed.104 Moreover, Cavendish’s female agency is held up as an example for future women – ‘your Grace […] shineth in all places (especially where your Grace hath been: France, Flanders, Holland, etc) to your everlasting honor and fame’ –,105 just like Nicot did in his letter to Sigea’s father, when he wrote that Sigea’s example would kindle (inflammabit) future Spanish women.
Two more addresses, one to ‘To Natural Philosophers’ and one ‘To the Reader’, come next, along with four authorial poems: in ‘The Poetess’s Hasty Resolution’, Cavendish addresses the question of financial loss associated with print (‘For shame, leave off, and do the printer spare; / He’ll lose by your ill poetry, I fear’)106 on quality (not gender)107 grounds, a strategy utilized by nobles to appear uninterested in the ‘economics of publication’.108 In all such pieces, modesty topoi (‘the very mark of literariness’)109 are adapted to project a naturally learned ethos that would seemingly please noble and common readers, while invalidating possible criticism from the most conservative learned ones: ‘Margaret Newcastle’ claims to publish for conveying truth and escaping idleness; refers to the discussion of literary arrangement as food; calls her book a child; claims to be uneducated and mentally limited, as well as fearful of receiving criticism and of writing under constraints.110 Even the claim that she understood no foreign language, curiously at a time when language manuals abounded,111 functions as an adaptation of the trope of rusticitas, given its spatial location within the book (within the paratext, ‘To All Natural Philosophers’) and her intermittent insistence on possessing knowledge (i.e. on atomic theory)112 for the learned:
‘Consider my Sex and Breeding, and […] fully Excuse those Faults which must Unavoidably be found in my Works’, she would still claim in her seventh print publication, Sociable Letters, printed in London by William Wilson in 1664 – in Letter 26, nonetheless, her foreign language education is suggested on the grounds of social custom, gender, and class.114 Another specific treatment of female authorship is found in Part IV. The prefatory essay, ‘To All Writing Ladies’, provides not one single woman’s name, despite being concerned with the manifestation and application of wit from a female authorial perspective:
It is to be observed that there is a secret working by Nature, as to cast an influence upon the minds of men. Like as in contagions, when as the air is corrupted, it produces several diseases, so several distempers of the mind, by the inflammations of the spirits. And as in healthful bodies are purified, so wits are refined; yet it seems to me as if there were several invisible spirits, that have several but visible powers, to work in several ages upon the minds of men […]. In some ages all men seek absolute power, and every man would be emperor of the world, which makes civil wars […]; and it seems as if there were spirits of the feminine gender, as also the masculine. There will be many heroic women in some ages, in other very prophetical; in some ages very pious and devout, for our sex is wonderfully addicted to the spirits. But this age hath produced many effeminate writers, as well as preachers, and many effeminate rulers, as well as actors.115
Was this a final paratextual strategy to make her first publication stand out within English letters? Certainly, learned women across borders and where she had admittedly lived (France, Flanders, and Holland) enjoyed then greater visibility through print than in the previous age, both via their own Latin and vernacular works – i.e. Oliva Sabuco de Nantes’s Nueva filosofía de la naturaleza del hombre (Madrid, 1587, 1588; Braga, 1622), esteemed by seventeenth-century scientists like Charles le Pois and Étienne de Clave; Lucrezia Marinelli’s La nobiltà et eccellenze delle donne (Venice, 1600), another reputed philosophical work, which went through various editions; the correspondence and other publications of Anna Maria van Schurman and her network; and of course, Anne Bradstreet’s The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America (London, 1650), canonizing others, such as Sidney, du Bartas, and Queen Elizabeth, as part of her self-promotion –,116 and via their acknowledgment in bio- and bibliographical accounts of contemporary literature, either in the vernacular, or in more scholarly publications, such as Schottus’s Hispaniae Bibliotheca. But this is not all. Having argued their contribution to society throughout the ages philosophically, Cavendish, nevertheless, speaks of women as ‘poor, dejected spirits, that are not ambitious of fame’ before calling for action, which again, has the effect of heightening her natural leadership:117
And if it be an age when the effeminate spirits rule, as most visibly they do in every kingdom, let us take the advantage, and make the best of our time […]; whether it be in the Amazonian government, or in the politic commonwealth, or in the flourishing monarchy, or in schools of divinity, or in lectures of philosophy, or in witty poetry, or in anything that may bring honor to our sex. They are poor, dejected spirits that are not ambitious of fame […]. But let us strive to build us tombs while we live, of noble, honorable, and good actions (at least harmless), That though our bodies die, Our names may live to after memory. [my italics]
Here, too, Cavendish was drawing on popular ideas (since Plato)118 for her authorial self-fashioning: for instance, Erasmus’s eruditae could envision women presiding in schools of theology and preaching in churches; van Schurman defended that some women, not all, are naturally talented; while for Bartoli, acts and deeds were ‘the most natural testimonies of potentiality’ to establish a disposition for the arts, or the sciences.119 Therefore, Cavendish’s prefatory essay makes clear that such ideas continued to be reinforced and celebrated consensually, as well as exploited for profit. Put differently, the omission of women’s names in this paratext should be suspect: by claiming to lack in knowledge and not drawing attention to others, she appeared cleverer as a result (according to Erasmus’s eruditae)120 while seemingly invalidating all female competition – the use of protofeminist discourse simply reinforces its female appeal. Crucially, the strategy builds on Renaissance practices – i.e. Stampa does similarly concerning Sappho – and resonates with other contemporary cases, such as Zayas’s deliberate silence over modern referents.121 That the preface essay was not included in the 1664 and 1668 revised versions (perhaps influenced by Caramuel Lobkowitz’s newly published printing manual)122 further substantiates that Poems and Fancies engaged with and exploited ongoing intellectual debates – gender was only one – 123 and publishing practices.124 Hence the advertisement on which it ends, also absent from the revised versions: ‘Reader, I have a little tract of philosophical fancies in prose, which will not be long before it appears in the world’.125
Curiously, the removal of such a prefatory essay from its later editions matches the time when Katherine Philips, the admired scribal poet, scholar, and founder (in the 1650s) of the literary salon ‘Society of Friendship’, was being publicised through print. This is noteworthy, because Philips’s 1667 posthumous publication includes new scholarly material and an extensive collection of prefatory poems, even an authorial portrait, showcasing her ample intellectual ability and experience, right from its title – Poems by the Most Deservedly Admired Mrs. Katherine Philips, The Matchless Orinda: to which is added Monsieur Corneille’s Pompey & Horace, Tragedies; with several other Translations out of French. The publisher’s preface includes a letter addressed to a ‘Worthy Poliarchus’, signed by Philips, wherein the 1664 publication is deemed ‘a false Copy’. Nonetheless, its material context, literary form, the scholarly additions, and the prominent role of the printer-publisher make the claim suspect, given the catchpenny value associated with secretly handed work when it finally reached print (‘with authority or without it’)126 – not to mention distancing oneself from the act of publication was becoming a common strategy, even among ostensibly commercial authors, while such paratexts did indeed heighten interest in the ‘authorized’ volume.127 In fact, the 1667 publication is promoted as the ‘Monument’ Philips ‘erected for her self’, which not only enacts Cavendish’s concluding words in ‘To All Writing Ladies’, but is also ‘to be honoured as the honour of her Sex, the emulation of ours, and the admiration of both’ for concerning ‘the English Sappho’, a long-proven publishing strategy. Even Philips’s preferred name, Orinda, ‘deserves to be added to the number of the Muses’, adds the publisher.128
In this new light, Poems and Fancies stands as the commercial product, or event,129 of an English, scholarly-driven female author of the times, in which the crave for personal distinction and the economics of publication increasingly overshadowed collegiality, especially in secular print. Cavendish’s ‘thoroughgoing monumentalisation’130 included over a dozen original print works – poetry, essays, plays, orations, epistolary philosophy and science fiction romance, political parody, biography and memoir (here ‘in imitation of Classical writers’131 since Petrarch) – and renown in natural philosophy, which immediately inspired other women and their book producers to follow suit. ‘Margaret Newcastle’ herself sent her philosophical works to many well-known philosophers and to the faculties at Cambridge and Oxford, and in 1667, she attended the Royal Society of London by invitation.132 In 1672, a year before she died in London, Antonius’s Bibliotheca Hispana Nova appeared in Rome and Paris, bearing a frontispiece by a professional Italian female painter and engraver: ‘Theresia del Pó sculp.’. The work lists women’s names from religious and secular traditions alongside their male counterparts (i.e. three women called Luisa, including Sigea, are preceded and followed, in alphabetical order, by men whose first names begin with Ludovicus and Lupercius), but also in a separate section, thereby further reinforcing women’s real place within the learned world: the separate section is entitled Gynaeceum Hispanae Minervae, sive de gentis nostrae foeminis doctrina claris scriptorum (Hispanic women’s literary quarters in the Greek household), thus tying in those represented with ancient women, and by extension, with all learned women up to then.133
3 Conclusions
Thus even a short comparative, transnational analysis, which prioritizes cultural products over ideologies, yields a different interpretation of the early modern learned world – most notably, the fact that learned women represented a recognized group identity, which along with its readings, however different or contradictory at times, did not cease to be shared, celebrated, and reinforced as part of the Republic of Letters’ cultural memory.
Right from the start, Luisa Sigea Toletana and Margaret Cavendish, or Newcastle, fashioned their female scholarly identities, aided by their male peers, to great success. In each case, the processes of self-fashioning and promotion were shaped according to textual tradition and the times in which they lived. To pursue and lay claim to personal distinction as a scholar was different before and after the major process of literary commercialization, which characterized the seventeenth century, as was to attract financial profit. Nonetheless, authorial promotion, male and female, continued to draw on convention, on the strategies utilized by classical and “the first” modern authors – in manuscript and print; in Latin and the vernacular. Ultimately, this adaptation and/or reformulation of publishing strategies responded to the author’s situation (notably, class and religious status) and market needs.
Time and again, the analysis showed materially (via authorial and editorial practices) the important value invested in gendering works and audiences across borders – how Renaissance and Baroque individuals repeatedly reinforced scholarly opinion, even traded with women’s publications. In sum, it documents an appreciation of writing and publication as universal spheres, rather than as specifically masculine, which begs us to reconsider women’s contributions within the early modern learned world.
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Sigea [de Velasco] Luisa, [Duarum virginum colloquium de vita aulica et privata], in Serrano y Sanz M. (ed.), Apuntes para una biblioteca de escritoras: desde la formación del lenguaje hasta nuestros días, vol. II (Madrid: 1975) 419–471.
Sigea [de Velasco] Luisa, [Cartas], in Serrano y Sanz M. (ed.), Apuntes para una biblioteca de escritoras: desde la formación del lenguaje hasta nuestros días, vol. II (Madrid: 1975) 410–418.
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Wroth Mary, The Countesse of Mountgomeries Urania, Written by the Right Honorable the Lady Mary Wroath. Daughter to the Right Noble Robert Earle of Leicester. And Neece to the ever famous and renowned Sr Phillips Sidney knight. And to yr most exelent Lady Mary Countesse of Pembroke late deceased (London, Printed for John Marriott and John Grismand and are to bee sould at theire shop pes in St Dunstons Church: 1621).
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This work was funded by the European Commission (Ref. H2020-MSCA-IF-2018, 841036).
Darnton R., “What Is the History of Books”, in Finkelstein D. – McCleery A. (eds.), The Book History Reader (London: 2006) 22; Cayuela A., “’Esta pobre habilidad que Dios me dio’: autores, impresores y editores en el entuerto de la publicación (siglos XVI–XVII)”, Tiempos modernos, Special Issue “Cultura escrita y memoria en el Siglo de Oro” 8.31 (2015) 299–300; Fumaroli M., The Republic of Letters, trans. L. Vergnaud (New Haven – London: 2018) 35.
Marino A., The Biography of “the Idea of Literature” from Antiquity to the Baroque, trans. V. Stanciu – C.M. Carlton (New York: 1996) 128–129, 186–187.
Eisner M., Boccaccio and the Invention of Italian Literature. Dante, Cavalcanti, and the Authority of the Vernacular (Cambridge: 2013) 3, 5.
Pizan Christine de, La Cité des dames, ed. Th. Moreau – E. Hicks (Paris: 2000) 96. For the English translation, I chiefly relied on The Book of the City of Ladies, trans. E.J. Richards (New York: 1982) 67–68.
Boccaccio Giovanni, On Famous Women, intro. and trans. G.A. Guarino (New York: 2011) 99–100. Freeman P., Searching for Sappho. The Lost Songs and the World of the First Woman Poet (New York: 2016) 168–169; Isidore de Seville [Saint], Etimologías: edición bilingüe, ed. and trans. J. Oroz Reta – M.A. Marcos Casquero – M.C. Diaz y Diaz (Madrid: 2004) 340; Lawrance J., “Isidore of Seville in the Renaissance (1500–1700): The Role of Golden Age Spain”, in Wood J. – Fear A. (eds.), A Companion to Isidore of Seville (Leiden: 2019) 604, 614; see also Griva A., “The Reappearance of Sapphic Fragments in the Italian Renaissance”, Asian Journal of Language, Literature and Culture Studies 2.2 (2019) 1–10.
Bruni’s treatise was originally entitled, Epistola Leonardi Aretini ad Illustrem mulierem Baptistam de Malatestis, in litteris ac studiis humanitatis facundissima. See also Bruni Leonardo, “Leonardo Bruni d’Arezzo, De Studiis et Litteris: An English Version”, in Woodward W.H. (ed.), Vittorino da Feltre and Other Humanist Educators (Cambridge: 1912) 123; and Hankins J., “Humanism in the Vernacular: The Case of Leonardo Bruni”, in Celenza C.S. – Gouwens K. (eds.), Humanism and Creativity in the Renaissance. Essays in Honor of Ronald G. Witt (Leiden – Boston: 2006) 11–29.
Dionysius of Halicarnassus, On Literary Composition. Being the Greek Text of the De Compositione Verborum (in Greek and English), ed. W.R. Roberts (London: 1910) 238–239; Tylus J., “Naming Sappho: Gaspara Stampa and the Recovery of the Sublime in Early Modern Europe”, in Falkeid, U. –Feng A.A. (eds.), Rethinking Gaspara Stampa in the Canon of Renaissance Poetry (Farnham: 2015) 15–16.
Ribera Pietro Paolo de, Le Glorie inmortali de Trionfi, et Heroiche Imprese D’ottocento quarantacinque Donne Illustri antiche e modern (Venice, Appresso Evangelista Deuchino: 1609) 323–324.
Cowley, Abraham, Six Books of Plants, VI, trans. Aphra Behn (London, Printed for Charles Harper: 1689) 143. The first two books of Cowley’s Plantae were published in 1662 (Plantarum libri duo, London, Typis J. Flesher, & prostant apud Nath. Brooks sub Signo Angeli: 1662); the full six books were published posthumously in 1668 by Thomas Spratt as part of Cowley’s Latin poems: Poemata latina: in quibus continentur, sex libri plantarum, viz. duo Herbarum, Florum, Sylvarum, et unus miscellaneorum (London, Typis T. Roycroft, impensis Jo. Martyn: 1668).
Here I am building on Rigney A., “Plenitude, Scarcity and the Circulation of Cultural Memory”, Journal of European Studies 35.1 (2005) 14, 17, 23; as well as on Cox V., “Leonardo Bruni on Women and Rhetoric: De studdiis et litteris Revisited”, Rhetorica 27.1 (2009) 66–68.
I understand gender to be a socially situated performance, whose meaning only exists in transactions. Crawford M., Talking Difference. On Gender and Language (London – Thousand Oaks – New Delhi: 1995) 7–19.
McGann J.J., A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism (Charlottesville – London: 1992) 84. McKenzie D.F., Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts (New York: 1999) 23; Scott-Baumann E., Forms of Engagement. Women, Poetry, and Culture, 1640–1680 (Oxford: 2013) 7; Cayuela, “’Esta pobre habilidad que Dios me dio’: autores, impresores y editores en el entuerto de la publicación (siglos XVI–XVII)” 297; O’Callagham M., “‘My Printer, must haue somwhat to his share’: Isabella Whitney, Richard Jones, and Crafting Books”, Women’s Writing 26.1 (2019) 15–16.
Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria, XII, 1, 29: ‘Prodit se, quamlibet custodiatur, simulatio, nec unquam tanta fuerit loquendi [Sigea has ‘fuit eloquendi’] facultas ut [Sigea has ‘quae’] non titubet ac haereat, quotis ab animo [Sigea has ‘ab eo quod latet’] verba dissentiunt’). Sigea Luisa, Epistolario latino, ed. M.R. Prieto Corbalán (Madrid: 2007) 101, note 22.
Sigea Luisa, [Cartas], in Serrano y Sanz M. (ed.), Apuntes para una biblioteca de escritoras: desde la formación del lenguaje hasta nuestros días, vol. II (Madrid: 1975) 411 (with ‘quamtum’ for ‘quantum’ in the first line). My translation.
Jardine L., Erasmus, Man of Letters. The Construction of Charisma in Print (Princeton – Oxford: 2015) 151.
Poska A.M., “The Case for Agentic Gender Norms for Women in Early Modern Europe”, Gender & History 30.2 (2018) 354, 361; Gilleir A. – Montoya A.C., ‘Introduction: Toward a New Conception of Women’s Literary History’, in Gilleir, A. – Montoya A.C. – Dijk S. van (eds.), Women Writing Back. Transnational Perspectives from the Late Middle Ages to the Dawn of the Modern Era (Leiden: 2010) 18–19.
Crawford – Chaffin, “The Reader’s Construction of Meaning: Cognitive Research on Gender and Comprehension”, in Flynn E.A. – Schweickart P.P. (eds.), Gender and Reading. Essays on Readers, Texts, and Contexts (Baltimore: 1986) 11, 25.
Erasmus Desiderius, Familiarum colloquiorum opus (Antwerp: 1541) 309. It was first published under the characters’ names (Antronius and Magdalia) within the Colloquia Basil edition of 1524, soon appearing also in vernacular languages (i.e. in 1529 in Spanish). Ledo J., “El abad y la muchacha instruida”, in Solana Pujalte J. – Carande R. (eds.), Erasmo de Róterdam. Coloquios, vol. 1 (Zaragoza: 2020) 493.
I am referring to a degree of frequency exclusively, since the authorial signature left through self-inscription in Marie de France’s Lais, for instance, already substantiates this knowledge – it represents ‘the trace both of her authorship and her invention’. Edwards, R.R., Invention and Authorship in Medieval England (Ohio: 2017) 60.
The notion of ‘factual paratext’ is identified and explained in Genette G., Paratexts. Thresholds of Interpretation, trans. J.E. Lewin (Cambridge: 1997) 7–8.
Rivera Garretas M.M., “La historia de las mujeres que nombra el mundo en femenino”, Acta Historica et Archeologica Mediaevalia 26 (2005) 1160.
Allen P., The Concept of Woman. The Early Humanist Reformation, vol. II (Grand Rapids, Michigan – Cambridge: 2002) 935. Cox, “Leonardo Bruni on Women and Rhetoric” 71–75.
Castiglione Baldassare, The Book of the Courtier, trans. and intro. G. Bull (London: 2003) 219; Villegas de la Torre E.M. (intro., ed., and trans.), El canto de la décima Musa: poesías del Renacimiento y el Barroco (Barcelona: 2020) 23–29.
Och M., “Vittoria Colonna in Giorgio Vasari’s ‘Life of Properzia de’ Rossi’”, in McIver K.A. (ed.), Wives, Widows, Mistresses, and Nuns in Early Modern Italy. Making the Invisible Visible through Art and Patronage (London – New York: 2012) 126.
Font Paz C., “Writing for Patronage or Patronage for Writing? Two Case Studies in Seventeenth-Century and Post-Restoration Women’s Poetry in Britain”, in Font Paz C. – Geerdink N. (eds.), Economic Imperatives for Women’s Writing in Early Modern Europe (Leiden: 2018) 102.
Colonna Vittoria, Sonnets for Michelangelo. A Bilingual Edition, ed. and trans. A. Brundin (Chicago – London: 2005) 5, 19; see also Crivelli T., “The Print Tradition of Vittoria Colonna’s Rime”, in Brundin A. – Crivelli T. – Sapegno M.S. (eds.), A Companion to Vittoria Colonna (Leiden: 2016) 69–139.
Eisner, Boccaccio and the Invention of Italian Literature 5, 9.
Marino, The Biography of “the Idea of Literature” 123.
Plato, Phaedrus, ed. and trans. R. Waterfield (Oxford: 2009) 13.
Stapleton R.F., “Minerva of Her Time: Luisa Sigea and Humanist Networking”, in Armstrong-Partida M. – Guerson A. – Wessell Lightfoot D. (eds.), Women and Community in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia (Nebraska: 2020) 230.
Pellicer de Ossau y Tovar, Joseph, Lecciones solemnes a las obras de Luis de Gongora y Argote (Madrid, Imprenta del Reino: 1630) 575–576, my translation. See also Schenkeveld-Van der Dussen A.M., “Anna Roemers Visscher: de tiende van de negen, de vierde van de drie”, Jaarboek van de Maatschappij der Nederlandse Letterkunde (1980) 3–13, about the Dutch poet Anna Roemers-Visscher, whom the Dutch Neolatin poet Daniel Heinsius called the ‘Tenth Muse’, the ‘Fourth of the Three’ (Graces), and ‘a Dutch Minerva’ – epithets reiterated by other vernacular poets, such as Jacob Cats and Joost van den Vondel, the latter also calling her ‘een Hollandtsche Sappho’ (10).
Enenkel K.A.E., “Modelling the Humanist: Petrarch’s Letter to Posterity and Boccaccio’s Biography of the Poet Laureate”, in Enenkel K.A.E. – Jong-Crane B. de – Liebregts P. (eds.), Modelling the Individual. Biography and Portrait in the Renaissance, With a Critical Edition of Petrarch’s “Letter to Posterity” (Amsterdam – Georgia: 1998) 43. Sánchez Jiménez, A., Lope pintado por sí mismo: mito e imagen del autor en la poesía de Lope de Vega Carpio (London: 2006) 15; Kay D.W., Ben Jonson. A Literary Life (London: 2017) 49.
Tylus, “Naming Sappho: Gaspara Stampa and the Recovery of the Sublime in Early Modern Europe” 17. Bourdieu P., The Field of Cultural Production. Essays on Art and Literature, ed. and intro. R. Johnson (Cambridge: 1993) 106; see also Villegas de la Torre E.M., “‘Décima moradora del Parnaso’: género y tolerancia en la República literaria de la primera modernidad”, in García Cárcel R. – Serrano Martín E. (eds.), Historia de la tolerancia en España (Madrid: 2021) 171–183.
Sigea, Epistolario latino 97.
Stevenson J., Women Latin Poets. Language, Gender, & Authority from Antiquity to the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: 2005) 214.
Baranda N., “De investigación y bibliografía: con unas notas documentales sobre Luisa Sigea”, Lemir, 10 (2006) 5.
Carabias Torres A.M., “Beatriz Galindo y Lucía de Medrano: ni maestra de reinas ni catedrática de derecho canónico”, Investigaciones Históricas, Época Moderna y Contemporánea 39 (2019) 192.
See Villegas de la Torre E.M., “Gender in Early Constructions of Authorship, 1447–1518”, Theory Now: Journal of Literature, Critique and Thought, Special Issue “El autor en la modernidad” 1.2 (2019) 33–50.
Pacheco Miguel, Vida de la Serenissima Infanta Doña Maria (Lisboa, Ivan de la Costa: 1675) fols. 89–91, 94–97.
Miert D. van, “Language and Communication in the Republic of Letters: The Uses of Latin and French in the Correspondence of Joseph Scaliger”, Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance 72 (2010) 17, 24.
Sigea, Epistolario latino 26, 42; Pacheco, Vida 98–99.
Ribera, Le Glorie inmortali 294–295, 307–310. Borreguero Beltrán C., “Puellae Doctae en las cortes peninsulares”, Dossiers Feministes 15 (2011) 80–86; see also Oettel Th., “Una catedrática en el siglo de Isabel la Católica”, Boletín de la Real Academia de la Historia 107 (1935) 289–368. Allen, The Concept of Woman 935.
Pizan Christine de, O Livro das Tres Vertudes a Insinança das Damas, ed. M.L. Crispim (Lisboa: 2002) 309, 78.
Erasmus, Familiarum colloquiorum 557–559.
Vian Herrero A., “El Colloquium duarum virginum de Luisa Sigea en la tradición dialógica del escepticismo académico”, in Vian, A. – Baranda C. (eds.), Letras humanas y conflictos del saber: la filología como instrumento a través de las edades (Madrid: 2008) 190, 198–199, 207–208.
I am building on Jiménez Calvente T., Un siciliano en la España de los Reyes Católicos: los Epistolarum familiarum libri XVII de Lucio Marineo Sículo (Alcalá: 2001) 122.
Enenkel, “Modelling the Humanist” 47.
Villegas de la Torre E.M., “Writing Literature for Publication, 1605–1637”, in Wilkinson A.S. –Ulla Lorenzo A. (eds.), A Maturing Market. The Iberian Book World in the First Half of the Seventeenth Century (Leiden: 2017) 127; Stapleton, “Minerva of Her Time: Luisa Sigea and Humanist Networking” 242.
Minuzzi S., The Invention of the Author. The ‘Privilegio di Stampa’ in Renaissance Venice (Venice: 2017) 14–15.
Pask K., The Emergence of the English Author. Scripting the Life of the Poet in Early Modern England (Cambridge: 1996) 2; Sigea, Epistolario latino 36.
Vasaeus Johannes, Chronici rerum memorabilium Hispaniae (Salamanca, excudebat Ioannes Iunta: 1552) fol. 19.
Postel Guillaume, Les Tres-Merveilleuses Victoires des Femmes do Nouveau Monde, et comment elles doibvent à tout le mon par raison commander, & même à ceulx qui auront la Monarchie du Monde vieil (Paris, chez Jehan Ruelle, à la Queuë de Regnard, ruë Sainct Jacques: 1553) 19, 16. My translation.
Thomas Hyrde such writes in the accompanying preface to Erasmus Desiderius, A devout treatise upon the Pater Noster made fyrst in latyn by the moost famous doctour mayster Erasmus Roterodamus and tourned in to englisshe by a yong vertuous and well lerned gentylwoman of xix. yere of age, trans. Margaret More Roper (London, Thomas Berthelet: [1526]) A2r–A4r.
From Benedetto Varchi’s contribution to the preliminaries of Stampa Gaspara, Rime di Madonna Gaspara Stampa (Venice, per Plinio Pietrasanta: 1554) A4r.
Labé Louise, Evvres de Lovïze Labé Lionnoize (Lyon, par Ian de Tovrnes: 1555) 9.
Miralles Maldonado J.C., “Jacobo Salvador de la Solana, un humanista murciano del XVI”, in Valverde Sánchez M. – Calderón Dorda E.A. – Morales Ortiz A. (eds.), Koinòs lógos: homenaje al profesor José García López, vol. II (2006) 648–650.
Robin D., Publishing Women. Salons, The Presses, and the Counter-Reformation in Sixteenth-Century Italy (Chicago – London: 2007) 51–52.
Cited in Baranda, “De investigación y bibliografía: con unas notas documentales sobre Luisa Sigea” 7. My translation.
Sigea, Epistolario latino 118–123, 73.
Sebastián Lozano J., “Sofonisba Anguissola: una mirada femenina en la corte”, in Calvo Serraller F. (coord.), Maestros en la sombra: la otra cara del Museo del Prado (Barcelona: 2013) 190, 192 and 194; Ribera, Le Glorie inmortali 313–316.
Vasari Giorgio, The Lives of the Artists, trans. J. Conaway Bondanella – P. Bondanella (Oxford: 2008) 283, 343 ; Ribera, Le Glorie inmortali 313–316.
Marino, The Biography of “the Idea of Literature” 131; Villegas de la Torre, El canto de la décima Musa 92–96; see also Font Paz, ‘Writing for Patronage or Patronage for Writing’.
Cited from Serrano y Sanz, Apuntes 403. My translation.
Marino, The Biography of “the Idea of Literature” 184, 187; Suárez de Figueroa Cristóbal, Plaza universal de todas ciencias y artes: parte traduzida de Toscano (Madrid, Luis Sanchez: 1615) 128.
Schottus Andreas, Hispaniae Bibliotheca, III (Francofurti, Apud Claudiusm Marnium & haeredes Iohan. Aubrii: 1608) 336, 340–344. Spinnenweber K., “The 1611 English Translation of St Teresa’s Autobiography”, SKASE: Journal of Translation and Interpretation 2.1 (2007) 5.
Moréri Louis, Le Grand Dictionaire Historique, ov le Melange Curieux de l’Histoire Sacree et Profane, vol. nio (Lyon, chez Jean Girin, & Barthelemy Riviere: 1681) 471, my translation. Maestre Maestre J.M., “La carta en latín de un Scholasticus Toletanus a Luisa Sigea: ¿misiva verdadera o falsificación literaria?”, RELAT: Revista de Estudios Latinos 19 (2019) 162–163, 207.
Richardson B.. Printing, Writers and Readers in Renaissance Italy (Cambridge: 1999) 80; Pinciano López, Philosophia Antigua Poetica, ed. A. Carballo Picazo, vol. I (Madrid: 1973) 155; Saavedra Fajardo Diego de, República literaria, ed. J.C. de Torres (Madrid: 1999) 65; Crisciani C., “Histories, Stories, Exempla, and Anecdote: Michele Savonarola from Latin to Vernacular”, in Pomata, G. –Siraisi N.G. (eds.), Historia. Empiricism and Erudition in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge – London: 2005) 316; Bouza F., “Para qué imprimir: de autores, público, impresores, y manuscritos en el Siglo de Oro”, Cuadernos de Historia Moderna, 18 (1997) 33; Cayuela, “‘Esta pobre habilidad que Dios me dio’: autores, impresores y editores en el entuerto de la publicación (siglos XVI–XVII)” 304–305.
Bartoli Daniello, The Man of Letters. Defended and Emended, trans. G. Woods (New York: 2018) vi.
Ibidem 188–189.
From ‘Censvra del Doctor Don Felix de Lucio Espinosa y Malo, Doctor en ambos derechos, por la insigne Vniversidad de Napoles’, in idem, Hombre de letras. Escrito en italiano […] y aora nuevamente en castellano, trans. Gaspar Sanz (Madrid, por Andrés García de la Iglesia […]. A costa de Iuan Martin Merinero, Mercader de libros. Vendese en su casa en la Puerta del Sol: 1678) C4r.
From ‘To the Reader’, in Dryden John, Of Dramatick Poesie, an Essay (London, Printed for Henry Herringman, at the Sign of the Anchor, on the Lower-walk of the New Exchange: 1668) A4v.
Enenkel, “Modelling the Humanist” 42–43.
Pal C., Republic of Women. Rethinking the Republic of Letters in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: 2012) 3; Villegas de la Torre, El canto de la décima Musa 271–272; Trambaioli M., “La fama póstuma de Lope de Vega”, Studia Aurea 10 (2016) 174.
Gournay Marie de, “Marie le Jars de Gournay: The Equality of Men and Women”, in Clarke D.M. (ed.), The Equality of the Sexes. Three Feminist Texts of the Seventeenth Century, (Oxford: 2013) 62; Jonson Ben, Timber: or, Discoveries; Made Upon Men and Matter: As They have flow’d out of his daily Readings, or had their reflux to his peculiar Notion of the Times (London: 1641) 89.
Johns A., The Nature of the Book. Print and Knowledge in the Making (Chicago – London: 1998) 76.
Bell M., “Women and the Production of Texts: The Impact of the History of the Book”, in Hinks J. – Gardner V. (eds.), The Book Trade in Early Modern England. Practices, Perceptions, Connections (New Castle – Delaware – London: 2014) 114. See also the database of female printers in Antwerp, Louvain and Douai, compiled by Heleen Wyffels at the Catholic University of Leuven:
Cavendish Margaret, Poems and Fancies with The Animal Parliament, ed. B.R. Siegfried (Toronto – Tempe: 2018) 139. Henceforth referred to as Poems and Fancies.
Hobbes Thomas, De corpore politico, or The elements of the law, moral and politick with discourses upon severall heads, as of [brace] the law of nature, oathes and covenants, several kinds of government: with the changes and revolutions of them (London, Printed by T. R. for J. Ridley, and are to be sold at the Castle of Fleestreet: 1652). For information on Cavendish’s printers and booksellers, see Kroetsch C., “List of Margaret Cavendish’s Texts, Printers, and Booksellers (1653–1675)”, Digital Cavendish Project, Accessed 19 July 2021 <
From the introduction to Cavendish, Poems and Fancies 18.
Weber H., Memory, Print, and Gender in England, 1653–1759 (New York – Basingstoke: 2016) 37.
On the often ignored, wide diversity of reading forms, meanings, and spaces in the early modern period, see Castillo Gómez A., Leer y oír: ensayos sobre la lectura en los Siglos de Oro (Madrid – Frankfurt, 2016) 121–152.
Cavendish, Poems and Fancies 148.
Blair A, “Conrad Gessner’s Paratexts”, Gesnerus 73.1 (2016) 80; see also Villegas de la Torre E.M., “Autoría femenina y campo literario en la primera mitad del s. XVII”, Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies 20.4 (2019) 337–352.
Cavendish, Poems and Fancies 58.
Digby Kenelme, Observations on the 22. Stanza in the 9th Canto of the 2nd. Book of Spencers Faery Queen. Full of excelent Notions concerning the Frame of Man, and his rationall Soul (London, Printed for Daniel Frere Bookseller at the Red-Bull in Little Brittain: 1643) 2.
From ‘The Printer to the Reader’, in P[urslowe] E[lizabeth] [printer], Jonsonus Virbius or, The Memorie of Ben Johnson Revived by the Friends of the Muses (London, Printed by E. P. for Henry Seile, and are to be sold at his shop, at the Tygers Head in Fleetstret, over-against St Dunstans Church: 1638) fol. A2.
Pask, The Emergence of the English Author 95, 106, 109.
Marino, The Biography of “the Idea of Literature” 199.
From ‘To Her Grace the Duchess of Newcastle’, in Cavendish, Poems and Fancies 66.
Ross – Scott-Baumann (eds.), Women Poets of the English Civil War (Manchester: 2018) 199.
Cavendish, Poems and Fancies 58, 60.
Ross S.G., The Birth of Feminism. Woman as Intellect in Renaissance Italy and England (Cambridge – London: 2009) 2.
Erasmus, Familiarum colloquiorum 306; Scott-Baumann E., Forms of Engagement. Women, Poetry, and Culture, 1640–1680 (Oxford: 2013) 32.
Cavendish, Poems and Fancies 61.
Ray M.K., Daughters of Alchemy. Women and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy (Cambridge – London: 2015) 157.
Cavendish, Poems and Fancies 62.
Minnis A.J., Medieval Theory of Authorship. Scholastic Literary Attitudes in the Later Middle Ages (Philadelphia: 1988) 49.
Cavendish, Poems and Fancies 46.
Primrose Diana, Chaine of Pearle, Or a Memoriall of the peerles Graces, and Heroick Vertues of Queene Elizabeth of Glorious Memory (London, Printed for Thomas Paine, and are to be sold by Philip Waterhouse, at his shop at the signe of St. Pauls-head in Canning-street neere London-stone: 1630) A2r.
Villegas de la Torre, “‘Décima moradora del Parnaso’: género y tolerancia en la República literaria de la primera modernidad” 176–183; Altaba-Artal D., Aphra Behn’s English Feminism. Wit and Satire (Selinsgrove – London: 1999) 202.
Bartoli, The Man of Letters 241.
Cavendish, Poems and Fancies 63, 66, 65.
Villegas de la Torre, “Writing Literature for Publication, 1605–1637” 129; Kay, Ben Jonson. A Literary Life 51.
Cavendish, Poems and Fancies 66.
Ibidem 72.
Ross – Scott-Baumann, Women Poets of the English Civil War 211.
Richardson, Printing, Writers and Readers 60.
Pender P., Early Modern Women’s Writing and the Rhetoric of Modesty (Basingstoke: 2012) 3.
Cavendish, Poems and Fancies 66–67; Curtius E.R., European Literature and Latin Middle Ages, trans. W.R. Trask (Princeton: 1990) 83, 87.
Sumillera R.G., “Language Manuals and the Book Trade in England”, in Pérez Fernández, J.M. – Wilson-Lee E. (eds.), Translation and the Book Trade in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: 2014) 68–69.
Siegfried sees the work’s coherence as relying on three Epicurean themes: ‘atomic motion and form by which is expressed Nature’s creative variability; the pleasures, pains, and paradoxes of perception in relation to knowledge; and the tension between the constant emergence of new life […] and the inevitability of death’. Cavendish, Poems and Fancies 14.
Cavendish, Poems and Fancies 68–69. My italics.
From ‘To All Professors of Learning and Art’; idem, Sociable Letters, ed. J. Fitzmaurice (Ontorio: 2004) 40, 73.
Cavendish, Poems and Fancies 167.
Sabuco de Nantes, Oliva, New Philosophy of Human Nature: Neither Known to nor Attained by the Great Ancient Philosophers, Which Will Improve Human Life and Health, trans. and ed. M.E. Waithe – M. Colomer Vintró – C.A. Zorita (Illinois: 2007) 3; Allen P. – Salvatore P., “Lucrezia Marinelli and Women’s Identity in Late Italian Renaissance”, Renaissance and Reformation 28.4 (1992) 11; Larsen A.R., “A Women’s Republic of Letters: Anna Maria van Schurman, Marie de Gournay, and Female Self-Representation in Relation to the Public Sphere”, Early Modern Women Journal 3 (2008) 107; Pal, Republic of Women 3, 57; Seidler Engberg K., The Literary Politics of Anne Bradstreet and Phillis Wheatley (Lanham – Boulder – New York – Toronto – Plymouth: 2010) 28–32.
I am building on Dodds L., The Literary Invention of Margaret Cavendish (Pittsburgh – Pennsylvania: 2013) 225.
Plato, Republic, ed. and trans. R. Waterfield (Oxford: 2008) 165–169.
Erasmus, Familiarum colloquiorum 309; Schurman Anna Maria van, “A Dissertation on the Natural Capacity of Women for Study and Learning”, in Clarke D.M. (ed.), The Equality of the Sexes. Three Feminist Texts of the Seventeenth Century (Oxford: 2013) 80; Bartoli, The Man of Letters 182.
Erasmus, Familiarum colloquiorum 309.
Tylus, “Naming Sappho: Gaspara Stampa and the Recovery of the Sublime in Early Modern Europe” 38; Zayas Sotomayor María de, Honesto y entretenido sarao (Primera y segunda parte), ed. J. Olivares, vol. 1 (Zaragoza: 2017) 16; see also Villegas de la Torre E.M., “Erudición y lucro en la República literaria barroca: a propósito de María de Zayas”, Criticón, Special Issue “Las novelas amorosas y ejemplares de María de Zayas” (forthcoming).
I am building on Blair A, “Errata Lists and the Reader as Corrector”, in Baron S.A. – Lindquist E.N. – Shevlin E.E. (eds.), Agent of Change. Print Culture Studies After Elizabeth L. Eisenstein (Massachusetts: 2007) 26.
An only general interest in gender issues has been deemed characteristic of van Schurman’s scholarly network; see Pal, Republic of Women 66.
The call for acknowledging the also hybrid (mixed-sex) nature and contingency of premodern women’s print publication within the Anglo context is not new. Smith H., Grossly Material Things. Women and Book Production in Early Modern England (Oxford: 2012) 217. I am also indebted to Elizabeth Scott-Baumann and Sarah Ross for sharing with me, “’Corrected by the Author’? Women, Poetry, and Contingency of Seventeenth-Century Print Publication”, ahead of its publication this year.
Cavendish, Poems and Fancies 365.
Sheavyn P., The Literary Profession in the Elizabethan Age, ed. and rev. J.W. Saunders (Manchester: 1967) 167; Cayuela, “’Esta pobre habilidad que Dios me dio’: autores, impresores y editores en el entuerto de la publicación (siglos XVI–XVII)” 314–317; Wall, W., The Imprint of Gender. Authorship and Publication in the English Renaissance (Ithaca – London: 1993) 175.
Villegas de la Torre, “Writing Literature for Publication, 1605–1637” 136–140. For a discussion on the volume’s printer-publisher and retailer, see Crabstick B., “Katherine Philips, Richard Marriot, and the Contemporary Significance of Poems. By the Incomparable, Mrs. K. P. (1664)”, in Coolahan M.L. – Wright G. (eds.), Katherine Philips. Form, Reception, and Literary Contexts (London – New York: 2018) 63–83.
Philips Katherine, Poems by the Most Deservedly Admired Mrs. Katherine Philips, The Matchless Orinda: to which is added Monsieur Corneille’s Pompey & Horace, Tragedies; with several other Translations out of French (London, Printed by J.M. for H. Herringman, at the Sign of the Blew Anchor in the Lower Walk of the New Exchange: 1667) A1r, A1v, A2r.
‘a text accompanied by a narrative frame in which to set it, and supported by a variety of pendant pieces of printing, from title-page woodcut to dedicatory letters’. Jardine, Erasmus, Man of Letters 175.
Ross – Scott-Baumann, Women Poets of the English Civil War 19.
Enenkel, “Modelling the Humanist” 16.
Akkerman N.N.W. – Corporaal M.C.M., “Mad Science Beyond Flattery: The Correspondence of Margaret Cavendish and Constantijn Huygens”, Early Modern Literary Studies SI 14 (2004) 21.
Antonius Nicolas, Bibliotheca Hispana, sive Hispanorum, vol. II (Rome, Nicolaus Angelus Timassius: 1672) 56–58 and 337–347: the introduction to this appendix to a Catholic collection even praises the argument in defence of women’s intellectual capacities, published by van Schurman, ‘who resided in Utrecht the past few years, and who would be a miracle of our age, had she not dishonoured her outstanding gifts by contracting the infection of an heretic climate’ (338: ‘… a clarissima Anna Maria Schurman, Ultrajecti superioribus annis manente, atque huius saeculi mirculo futura, nisi praestantissimas dotes haeretici coeli contracta infectione dehonestaret’). See also Floris Solleveld’s contribution to this volume about the position of women in collective biographical dictionaries, in Isaac Bullart’s Académie (1682), Charles Perrault’s Hommes illustres (1696–1700) and Jacob Brucker’s Bilder-sal (1741–1755), as well as Lieke van Deinsen’s contribution on Cavendish, Schurman, and Maria Sybilla Merian.