Early Modern Women AN INTERDISCIPLINARY JOURNAL Volume I, 2006 Editors Jane Donawerth Adele Seeff Diane Wolfthal Book Review Editor Editorial Assistant Artistic Director Karen Nelson Meg Pearson Richard Chapman Center for Renaissance & Baroque Studies University of Maryland, College Park Arizona Center for Medieval & Renaissance Studies Arizona State University, Tempe Volume I Editorial Board, 2002-2006 Jane Couchman Margaret Mikesell Jane Donawerth Naomi Miller Nancy Gutierrez Karen Nelson Margaret Hannay Adele Seeff Mary Ellen Lamb Diane Wolfthal Amy Leonard Susanne Woods Carole Levin Naomi Yavneh Sara H. Mendelson Editorial Advisors, 2002–2006 Julia Marciari Alexander, Susan Dwyer Amussen, Linda Austern, Cristelle Baskins, Judith Bennett, Pamela Benson, Sheila Cavanagh, Elizabeth Cohen, Nicola Courtwright, Margaret Ezell, Valeria Finucci, Carole Fricke, Amy Froide, Mary Garrard, Elizabeth Hageman, Joan E. Hartman, Wendy Heller, Margaret Hunt, Ann Rosalind Jones, Gwynne Kennedy, Andrea Knox, Natasha Korda, Tomasin K. LaMay, Elizabeth Lehfeldt, Pamela Long, Phyllis Mack, Katherine McIver, Jacqueline Marie Musacchio, Lori Humphrey Newcomb, Lena Cowen Orlin, Mary Elizabeth Perry, Patricia Philippy, Anne Lake Prescott, Albert Rabil Jr., Phyllis Rackin, Magdalena S. Sanchez, Deanna Shemek, Bruce Smith, Hilda Smith, Sara Jayne Steen, Mihoko Suzuki, Betty S. Travitsky, Retha Warnicke, Elspeth Whitney, Abby Zanger, Georgianna Ziegler Acknowledgements Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal is sponsored by the Center for Renaissance & Baroque Studies of the University of Maryland, where the daily business of collecting, reviewing, editing, designing, and hand-wringing takes place. Our thanks go to the Director of the Center, Adele Seeff (in her other role), for her tireless oversight and relentless search for funding. We appreciate the support of the Dean of Arts and Humanities, James F. Harris, from the beginning, and the aid of the chairs of English, Charles Caramello and Gary Hamilton, and the chair of Women’s Studies, Bonnie Thornton Dill. EMWJ is also now a joint project with the Arizona Center for Medieval & Renaissance Studies at Arizona State University, who oversee printing and distribution of the journal. Our gratitude especially goes to Robert Bjork, Director of the Arizona Center for Medieval & Renaissance Studies, for his mediation between institutions and his sound advice. EMWJ is guided by its Editorial Advisors made up of the Planning Committee of the “Attending to Early Modern Women” Symposium and the officers and committee chairs of the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women. Elected members from both groups join with the editors to form the Editorial Board that makes decisions on article acceptance and reviewing standards. Our gratitude goes to all these hard-working scholars who yet find time to help guide the journal: their names are listed above. In addition, we are grateful to the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women for its financial contribution. We also thank the Sixteenth Century Studies conference for its crucial support. A great debt is owed to many people. Our fervent thanks go to Lourdes Maria Alvarez, Susan Dwyer Amussen, Linda Austern, Cristelle Baskins, Virginia Walcott Beauchamp, Elaine Beilin, Marvin Breslow, Hervé Campagne, Kent Cartwright, Sheila Cavanagh, Elizabeth Cohen, Theresa Coletti, Jane Couchman, Pamala S. Deane, Barbara Diefendorf, Susan Dinan, Michele A. Eastman, Joseph Falvo, Katie Field, Sheila ffolliott, Erika Gaffney, Elizabeth C. Goldsmith, Sharon Groves, Nancy Gutierrez, iv EMWJ 2006, vol. 1 Acknowledgements Elizabeth Hageman, Margaret Hannay, Joan E. Hartman, Wendy Heller, Franklin Hildy, Donna Hamilton, Sharon Jansen, Ann Rosalind Jones, Erin Kelly, Anamaria Kothe, Mary Ellen Lamb, Elizabeth Lehfeldt, Amy Leonard, Jacqueline Letzter, Carole Levin, Allison Levy, Yelena Luckert, Barbara Ann McCahill, Sara H. Mendelson, Margaret Mikesell, Naomi Miller, Claire G. Moses, Jacqueline Marie Musacchio, Debra Nails, Lena Cowen Orlin, Mary Elizabeth Perry, Patricia Philippy, Anne Lake Prescott, Albert Rabil, Jr., Margaret Rice, Irene Sanchez, Magdalena S. Sanchez, Brandie Siegfried, Martha Skeeters, Hilda Smith, Sara Jayne Steen, Mihoko Suzuki, Betty S. Travitsky, Valerie Wayne, Elissa Weaver, Wendy Weise, Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks, Richard Wexler, Gerhild Scholz Williams, Diane Wolfthal (in her former role as President of EMW), Susanne Woods, Naomi Yavneh, and Georgianna Ziegler. Contents Letter from the Editors ..................................................................................1 Jane Donawerth, Adele Seeff, and Diane Wolfthal, editors ‘High Housewifery’: the Duties and Letters of Barbara Gamage Sidney, Countess of Leicester ......................................................................................7 Margaret P. Hannay Bocche Inutili: Incorporating Pisa in the Florentine Imaginary ................37 Cristelle L. Baskins Maladies up Her Sleeve? Clerical Interpretation of a Suffering Female Body in Counter-Reformation Spain ..........................................................69 Susan Laningham Suppressing Women Philosophers: The Case of the Early Modern Canon ...............................................................................................99 John J. Conley, SJ Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed, Something Ermine: Elizabeth I’s Coronation Robes and Mothers’ Legacies in Early Modern England ............................................................................... 115 Elizabeth Mazzola A Renaissance Woman (Still) Adrift in the World ............................... 137 Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks Book Reviews Wendy Heller, Emblems of Eloquence: Opera and Women’s Voices in Seventeenth-Century Venice ........................................................................ 159 Sarah F. Williams Amy Leonard, Nails in the Wall: Catholic Nuns in Reformation Germany ................................................................................ 162 Rebecca Clark Nykwest vi EMWJ 2006, vol. 1 Contents Maria Bogucka, Women in Early Modern Polish Society, Against the European Background ................................................................................. 165 Elizabeth Driver Nancy Bradley Warren, Women of God and Arms: Female Spirituality and Political Conflict, 1380–1600 .................................................................... 168 Susan Dinan Jane Couchman and Ann Crabb, editors, Women’s Letters Across Europe, 1400–1700: Form and Persuasion ............................................................ 171 Erin A. Sadlack Pamela Allen Brown and Peter Parolin, editors, Women Players in England, 1500–1660: Beyond the All-Male Stage ................................... 175 Meg Pearson Contributors ............................................................................................ 179 Early Modern Women: An Interdiciplinary Journal 2006, vol. 1 Letter from the Editors Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal is the first annual journal devoted solely to the study of women and gender in the early modern period, that is, from 1400 to 1700. The journal is an out- growth of dedicated work by scholars in many fields during the past three decades. To begin our first volume, we wish to acknowledge our debt to the past by recounting the history of the several communities from which the journal has developed, and to offer our vision for what our new journal might accomplish. Dedicating a journal to the study of gender and to the history, literature, and arts of early modern women is no small accomplish- ment: it signals a significant step toward reformulating the questions we are all “allowed” to ask. As Natalie Zemon Davis suggested in the second volume of the “Attending” proceedings, establishing a field of early modern women’s studies has allowed us to complicate our vision, to see not only “hierarchies, exclusions, and dominations” balanced by “resourcefulness and resistance,” but also “the practices of the middle ground, the multiple tongues of complicity, coping, arguing, and exchange, out of which some- times, like a metamorphosis, a new moment is born” (35-6). During the 1980s, several key colloquia initiated conversations across disciplines on the subject of early modern women and consolidated the scholarship on Renaissance women that had burgeoned in the previous decade. Beginning with a 1976 Modern Language Association (MLA) session on feminist interpretations of Shakespeare, Carolyn Ruth Swift Lenz, Gayle Greene, and Carol Thomas Neely collected essays that were published in 1980 as The Woman’s Part: Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare by the University of Illinois Press. Two years later, Yale University con- 1 2 EMWJ 2006, vol. 1 Letter from the Editors vened “Renaissance Women/Renaissance Men: Studies in the Creation of Culture and Society,” and in 1983 the Newberry Library hosted “Changing Perspectives on Women in the Renaissance.” Both of these conferences resulted in ground-breaking publications—Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe, edited by Margaret W. Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy J. Vickers and published in 1986 by the University of Chicago Press; and Women in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, edited by Mary Beth Rose and published in 1986 by Syracuse University Press. At that same time, at both the Patristic, Medieval, and Renaissance Conference and the Sixteenth Century Studies Conference, sessions were devoted