This session reflects on early modern women who established themselves as literate in a time when they were excluded from a formal education and women’s participation in literary culture was very limited. The goal of this session is to recall the presidential theme of the 2020 MLA convention “Being Human” focusing on “Being Woman in early modern time.” In early modern Europe, women writers strove to redeem their role in society fighting the misbelief that persisted for centuries: woman as a creature physically, intellectually, morally and even spiritually inferior to men. Even if it was not easy, some women emerged as literate gaining the appreciation of the male counterparts and were acknowledged as clever, learned, and eloquent writers who could engage in intellectual and literary discourse.

This session includes papers on four distinct women writers who lived in different times and places and transgressing the boundaries, established a pro-female discourse in which they defended the dignity and capability of women. Their wisdom and intelligence allowed them to discern the way to let their voices be heard.

In her pastoral drama Flori, Maddalena Campiglia (1553-1595) embraced the classical pastoral tradition of Theocritus and Virgil and following the canons of Tasso’s Aminta in structure and plot. She was able to speak up for her gender, developing a distinctive feminine voice in order to announce an innovative message. Campiglia introduced a transgressive motif, leaving the reader or spectator wondering how much the love between Flori and Amaranta goes beyond friendly affection. In this way, Campiglia avoided exposing herself and becoming an easy target of the post-Tridentine Church, keeping her writing bounded by the decorum expected of respectable female writers of the noble class, as she was.

Margherita Sarrocchi (1560-1617) was a celebrated writer and scientist who had lively correspondence with Galileo Galilei. She prevailed as a well-connected and intelligent woman, successfully using her literary and scientific networks to push forward novel ideas in her work. In her heroic poem the Scanderbeide, Sarrocchi portrays a pro-women sentiment through the character of Silveria - a woman of the hunt turned guerriera. Not only does the bond Silveria forms with another woman warrior become an important marker of female bonding that works to showcase the power of women's friendship, but Silveria also routinely employs wit and logic to evade male predators revealing the poem’s proto-feminist agenda.

Elizabeth Tollet (1694-1754) who was said to speak “fluently and correctly the Latin, Italian, and French Languages; and well understood History, Poetry, and the Mathematicks” was in touch with intellectuals of the day, including Sir Isaac Newton. She let her voice be heard through poems where she criticizes the early modern women fate. As a an unusually well-home-educated British woman, Tollet in her poems, exquisitely articulated the horrors of mental confinement in being denied an university education while also showing her precise understanding of Newton’s refraction of light, the microscope’s revelation of worlds of natural detail and design, and the power men retain by keeping women ignorant.

Maria Edgeworth (1768-1849) was a prolific writer who used her writing to transcend gender and combat misogyny by severing the association of women with sentiment. For Edgeworth, women who insist on rationalizing emotional abuse in order to address their structural disempowerment within marriage remain victims. In her writing, Edgeworth demands women recognize their intellectual equality in order to rationally remedy the inequalities of marriage as an institution. Ultimately, through her works, Edgeworth celebrates the satirical history of women’s writing throughout the long eighteenth-century by redefining it according to the need to manifest a new understanding, not of what it means to be a man, but, instead, what it means to be a woman.

The papers on Campiglia and Sarrocchi contribute to the recent, growing scholarship on Italian women’s poetry done by Letizia Panizza, Margaret King, Virginia Cox, Valeria Finucci, and Meredith Ray who brought up a critical analysis of querelle des femmes, or the debate on the intelligence of women that arose in early modern time.
The paper on Tollet grows out of existing scholarship on early modern English women writers based on works by Jacqueline Broad, Julie Campbell, Margaret J. M. Ezell, and Sarah C.E. Ross. Edgeworth’s paper, instead, recalls Melinda Rabb’s analysis on satire’s domination of the literary world in the first half of the eighteenth century and on Rabb’s discussion on women’s restriction to the domestic in order to enforce passivity and made it hard to write satires.

The four female writers introduced by the panelists are closely related because of their literary (Campiglia, Sarrocchi, Tollet, and Edgeworth) and scientific interests and achievements (Sarrocchi and Tollet), and moreover, they have in common the determination to break entirely with the early modern expectation of gender roles and stand out as women literate in order to open up a space for narrating women’s lives.

The session will operate in this way: the chair will introduce the topic and each panelist before they begin their presentation providing their background and highlighting their major accomplishments. Each panelist will present her paper for no more than 14 minutes. At the end of the four presentations the chair will have 15 minutes to lead the discussion taking questions from the audience. The chair will be prepared to step in if the speaker and questioner are getting into a long-winded technical discussion.