Forum: Transnationalisms / Transculturalisms Early Modern Women and the Transnational Turn

Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal 2012, vol . 7

Forum: Transnationalisms / Transculturalisms

Early Modern Women and the Transnational Turn Merry Wiesner-Hanks

uddenly the transnational is everywhere. Until about 2000, historical Sstudies that looked beyond one nation or region generally termed themselves comparative, cross-national, international, or global, but within the last few years all of these words have become slightly old-fashioned, and “transnational” is the word of choice. This move has included the history of women, gender, and sexuality: a recent Forum in the American Historical Review was titled “Transnational Sexualities,” and the organizers of the 2011 Berkshire Women’s History conference, in their words, “restructured the conference to take advantage of new upsurges of intellectual energy in global history, transnational and transregional history,” with twenty-eight of the conference’s 190 sessions including the word “transnational” in their title.1 In many cases, “transnational” is used rather unreflectively as a syn- onym for comparative, cross-national, international, and global, or simply for conference sessions and essay collections that focus on more than one country. Some scholars have sought to define the term more closely, however. These more theoretical considerations have focused on the issue

1 “AHR Forum: Transnational Sexualities,” American Historical Review 114/5 (2009): 1250–1353, with articles by Margot Canaday, Marc Epprecht, Joanne Meyerowitz, Dagmar Herzog, Tamara Loos, Leslie Peirce, and Pete Sigal; conference program for the 15th Annual Berkshire Women’s History Conference, p. 3. I have considered the intersec- tions between transnational history and the history of women, gender, and sexuality more generally and at greater length in “Crossing Borders in Transnational Gender History,” Journal of Global History 6/3 (November 2011): 357–381. Some of the material in this article comes from that JGH article and is included here by permission of the London School of Economics and Political Science.

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of geographic borders and their crossing. As might be expected given the actual word, some of these have limited their definitions to national borders: Ian Tyrrell, for example, comments that “transnational history refers to a broad range of phenomena cutting across national boundaries.” 2 But most have included a wider range of borders. In their dictionary of transnational history, Akira Iriye and Pierre-Yves Saunier define their topic as “what moves between and across different polities and societies.”3 Steven Vertovec’s Transnational, an introduction to the field designed for stu- dents, describes the book’s subject as “sustained cross-border relationships, patterns of exchange, affiliations, and social formations.” 4 A widely-read discussion of transnational history published in the American Historical Review emphasizes the centrality of the study of “movements, flows, and circulations” across all borders.5 The narrower definition proposed by Tyrrell would seem to preclude studies of the early modern period, in which “nations,” as we understand them, were few. Indeed, most work that defines itself as transnational has focused on the world after the eighteenth century, and much, in fact, on the world after the twentieth century, in which transnational border-crossing is seen as a result of current patterns of globalization.6 If we use the broader definition, however, the early modern period offers many possibilities, particularly because scholars who examine the era from a global perspective often see border-crossing as its most distinctive feature. The description of The Journal of Early Modern History, launched

2 Ian Tyrrell, “Reflections on the Transnational Turn in United States History: Theory and Practice,” Journal of Global History 4/3 (November 2009): 454. 3 Akira Iriye and Pierre-Yves Saunier, eds., The Palgrave Dictionary of Transnational History: From the Mid-19th Century to the Present Day (New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2009), jacket. 4 Steven Vertovec, Transnationalism (London: Routledge, 2009), 2. 5 “American Historical Review Conversation: On Transnational History” (with Chris Bayly, Sven Beckert, Matthew Connelly, Isabel Hofmeyr, Wendy Kozol, and Patricia Seed), American Historical Review 111/5 (December 2006): 1441–64. 6 Deborah Cohen and Maura O’Connor, eds., Comparison and History: Europe in Cross-National Perspective (New York: Routledge, 2004) contains a long bibliography (pp. 186–97) of comparative, cross-national, and transnational studies for almost all of the modern period.

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at the University of Minnesota in 1997, states: “The early modern period of world history (ca. 1300–1800) was marked by a rapidly increasing level of global interaction. Between the aftermath of Mongol conquest in the East and the onset of industrialization in the West, a framework was established for new kinds of contacts and collective self-definition across an unprecedented range of human and physical geographies.”7 Sanjay Subrahmanyam comments that the period “defines a new sense of the lim- its of the inhabited world, in good measure because it is in a fundamental way an age of travel and discovery, of geographical redefinition.”8 He sees the effects of these interactions in “complex changes in political theology” and “new and intensified forms of hierarchy, domination, and separation.”9 Evelyn Rawski agrees, noting that “elites, ideas, and religions moved across regions with greater frequency than ever before, significantly influencing intellectual and cultural life.”10 Like all interactions, those of the early modern era were gendered, but they took a new form. The contacts between cultures in the era before 1400 that had worked to change gender structures had often been carried out through the transmission of ideas and construction of institutions by individuals or small groups of people; the spread of Christianity,

7 http://www.brill.nl/journal-early-modern-history. Sponsored by the University of Minnesota. Accessed 4/13/12. 8 Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “Connected Histories: Notes toward a Reconfiguration of Early Modern Eurasia,” Modern Asian Studies 31/3 (1997): 735–62, here 737. For a particularly forceful articulation of this view, see Jerry Bentley, “Early Modern Europe and the Early Modern World,” in Charles H. Parker and Jerry H. Bentley, eds., Between the Middle Ages and Modernity: Individual and Community in the Early Modern World (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007), 13–32 . For a discussion of some of the con- troversies related to the use of “early modern,” especially for studying women and gender, see my “Do Women Need the Renaissance?” Gender & History 20 (November 2008): 539–57. (Issue also separately published as Alexandra Shepard and Garthine Walker, eds., Gender and Change: Agency, Chronology and Periodisation [London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009].) 9 Subrahmanyam, “Connected Histories,” 739. 10 Evelyn S. Rawski, “The Qing Formation and the Early-Modern Period,” in Lynn Struve, ed., The Qing Formation in World-Historical Time (Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center, 2004), 211.

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neo-Confucianism, and Islam are all examples of this. Beginning in the late fifteenth century, however, transnational contacts often involved the movement of large numbers of people over vast distances. In all of these movements, the gender balance between men and women was never equal, so that traditional patterns of marriage and family life were disrupted and new patterns were formed. A growing body of scholarship is examining these new patterns, developing rich analyses of the social and cultural forms that emerged in the more connected early modern world. Women certainly travelled and migrated in the early modern era, and scholars in a number of fields are examining their experiences, often through the written records that they left behind.11 The vast majority of merchants, conquerors, slaves, and settlers who traveled great distances were men, however. Though there were attempts to keep groups apart, this proved impossible. Intermarriage and other types of sexual relationships among individuals from different groups in the early modern era occurred especially in colonies or border regions that Kathleen Brown has labeled “gender frontiers.”12 Research is demonstrating how such relationships

11 Natalie Zemon Davis, Women on the Margins: Three Seventeenth-Century Lives (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995); Rebecca Larson, Daughters of Light: Quaker Women Preaching and Prophesying in the Colonies and Abroad, 1700–1775 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000); Susan E. Dinan and Debra Meters, eds., Women and Religion in Old and New Worlds (London: Routledge, 2001); Karen Vieira Powers, Women in the Crucible of Conquest: The Gendered Genesis of Spanish American Society, 1500–1600 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico, 2005); Bernadette Andrea, Women and Islam in Early Modern English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Daniella Kostroun and Lisa Vollendorf, Women, Religion and the Atlantic World, 1600–1800 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009). 12 Kathleen Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996). Like so much else in gender history, the role of intermarriage and other sexual relationships in the creation of racial categories has been particularly well studied for North America: Kirsten Fischer, Suspect Relations: Sex, Race, and Resistance in Colonial North Carolina (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001); Elise Lemire, “Miscegenation”: Making Race in America, (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002); Nancy Shoemaker, A Strange Likeness: Becoming Red and White in Eighteenth-century North America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004; Thomas N. Ingersoll, To Intermix with our White Brothers: Indian Mixed Bloods in the United States from Earliest Times to the

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were interwoven with developing notions of racial difference and national identity. As Giulia Calvi summarizes in her recent comparison of global gender history in Europe and the US, “the gendered bodies of colonizers and colonized formed a contact zone where racialized notions of gender relations and difference were constructed through the exercise and repre- sentation of colonial power.”13 To take one example in detail: Saliha Belmessous, Jennifer Spear, and Guillame Aubert have analyzed the way French policy in colonial North America changed depending on changing ideas about how best to increase both the colonies’ and France’s strength. Most immigrants in the seventeenth century were unemployed young men from urban environments, who stayed briefly and then either died or went back to France. For a brief period in the 1660s the French crown directly recruited young women to go to New France, mostly poor women from charity hospitals, and paid for their passage. About eight hundred of these filles du roi (daughters of the king) did immigrate, more than doubling the number of European women who were not nuns, but their numbers were never great enough to have a significant effect on the population. French finance minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert decided not to expand the program, however, stating explicitly in 1667 that “it would not be wise to depopulate the kingdom in order to populate Canada.” Instead he recommended that “the most useful way to achieve it would be to try to civilize the Algonquins, the Hurons, and the other Savages who have embraced Christianity; and to persuade them to come to settle in a commune with the French, to live with them, and educate their children in our mores and our customs . . . after some time, having one law and one master, they may form one people and one blood.”14

Indian Removal (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2005); Peggy Pascoe, What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010). 13 Giulia Calvi, “Global Trends: Gender Studies in Europe and the US,” European History Quarterly 40/4 (2010): 645. 14 Letter from Colbert to Intendant Jean Talon, January 5, 1666, quoted and translated in Saliha Belmessous, “Assimilation and Racialism in Seventeenth and Eighteenth- Century French Colonial Policy,” American Historical Review 110/2 (April 2005): 325, 326.

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Thus official policy in New France in the seventeenth century was one of the assimilation of Native Americans through Fransication, through which they would be “made French.” The policy of Fransication included intermarriage between French men and indigenous women, for the French hoped that such marriages would help the fur trade and strengthen ties between French and Native American communities and families. In a few cases, this policy had exactly the effect that the government hoped it would: couples married in Christian ceremonies and Indian women adopted the clothing, work patterns, and language of French women; they crossed the border from native to French. In many more cases the opposite happened, however. Marriages, if they occurred at all, were “in the custom of the land,” and French men adopted “savage” customs. Official opinion changed. “One should never mix a bad blood with a good one,” wrote the governor of New France in 1709. “Our experience of [intermarriage] in this country ought to prevent us from permitting marriages of this kind, for all the French men who have married savage women have been licentious, lazy and have become intolerably independent; and the children they have had are even lazier than the savages themselves. Such marriages should thus be prohibited.”15 Prohibition of intermarriage became official policy in New France in 1716, and Indian/French marriages were discouraged by secular officials else- where in French North America. Despite the fulminations of authorities against mixing blood, however, European men and Indian women continued to engage in sexual relations in western French North America and, in areas where intermarriage worked to the benefit of the local people, to marry. These marriages were often formalized by Native American ritu- als rather than Christian ones; only sixty-five church marriages between French men and Indian women are listed in the records for all of New France during the whole period 1608 to 1765, out of a total of more than 27,000 marriages. In 1724, French colonial Louisiana (which included a large part of the Mississippi Valley) also forbade the “King’s white subjects” to “contract

15 Quoted in Guillame Aubert, “‘The Blood of New France’: Race and Purity of the Blood in the French Atlantic World,”’ William and Mary Quarterly 61/3 (2004): 449.

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a marriage or live in concubinage with Blacks.”16 Officials in Louisiana tried positive measures as well as prohibitions. They succeeded in convincing the king to pay again for the transport of women from France, and from 1704 to 1728 several hundred French women came to Louisiana. The adminis- trators wanted “hard-working girls . . . daughters of farmers and the like,” but the young women were often recruited from houses of detention in France, so instead turned out to be “women and girls of bad life” who were also “extremely ugly.” Male settlers refused to marry the new arrivals, and in 1727 the governor of Louisiana recommended building a “house of cor- rection here in order to put in the women and girls of bad lives who cause a public scandal.”17 The program was stopped in the following year. French Louisiana became an area of great cultural and racial mixing, a situation that has continued to today. Such shifting policy toward intermarriage and great variation in levels of enforcement can be found throughout the early modern colonial world.18 Marriage created an economic unit as well as a sexual relationship, and historians have begun to examine the economic consequences of intermarriage and other encounters involving men and women from different groups in frontier, border, and colonial areas.19 George Brooks, for example,

16 Aubert, “Blood of New France,” 459. 17 Quoted in Jennifer M. Spear, “‘They need wives’: Métissage and the Regulation of Sexuality in French Louisiana, 1699–1730,” in Martha Hodes, ed., Sex, Love, Race: Crossing Boundaries in North American History (New York: New York University Press, 1999), 47, 48, 50. See also Spear’s book, Race, Sex, and Social Order in Early New Orleans (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 2009). 18 See my Christianity and Sexuality in the Early Modern World: Regulating Desire, Reforming Practice, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2010) for a fuller discussion of this topic and references to many other studies. 19 See Susan Sleeper-Smith, Indian Women and French Men: Rethinking Cultural Encounter in the Western Great Lakes (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001); Leonard Blussé, Bitter Bonds: A Colonial Divorce Drama of the Seventeenth Century, trans. Diane Webb (Princeton: Markus Wiener, 2002); Katie Pickles and Myra Rutherdale, eds., Contact Zones: Aboriginal and Settler Women in Canada’s Colonial Past (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2005); Barbara Watson Andaya, The Flaming Womb: Repositioning Women in Early Modern Southeast Asia (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2006); Juliana Barr, Peace Came in the Form of a Woman: Indians and Spaniards in the Texas Borderlands (Chapel Hill: University of North

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traces the ways in which European and local notions about acceptable marriage partners combined in the early modern colonies of West Africa to create distinctive economic and social patterns. In the patrilineal societies of West Africa, such as the Mandinka and Wolof, Portuguese men and their mixed-race children were not allowed to marry local people of free standing, as this could give them claims to land use; their children could not inherit or join the kin and age-grade associations that shaped political power structures. Brooks has found that this meant mixed-race children generally went into trade, and in some places women became the major traders, with large households, extensive networks of trade, and many servants and slaves. Because these wealthy female traders, called nharas in Crioulo and signares in French, had connections with both the African and European worlds, they were valued as both trade and marriage partners by the French and English traders who moved into this area in the eighteenth century. “Some of these women were married in church,” reported one French commentator, “others in the style of the land, which in general consists of the consent of both parties and the relatives.”20 In the latter form of marriage, the women’s European husbands would have paid bridewealth to their new in-laws (instead of receiving a dowry as was the custom in Europe), provided a large feast, and been expected to be sexually faithful. If the husband returned to Europe, the signare was free to marry again. Thus intermarriage facilitated and was a key part of a pattern of cultural exchange in which European men adopted local customs far more than

Carolina Press, 2007); Gunlög Fur, A Nation of Women: Gender and Colonial Encounters among the Delaware Indians (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009); Jean Gelman Taylor, The Social World of Batavia: European and Eurasian in Dutch Asia, 2nd ed. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009). 20 Quoted in George E. Brooks, Eurafricans in Western Africa: Commerce, Social Status, Gender, and Religious Observance from the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Century (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2003), 214. Two other studies that also examine gender in the early modern Afro-Portuguese Atlantic are James Sweet, Recreating Africa: Culture, Kinship, and Religion in the African-Portuguese World, 1441–1770 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003) and J. Lorand Matory, Black Atlantic Religion: Tradition, Transnationalism, and Matriarchy in the Afro-Brazilian Candomblé (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005).

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their indigenous wives adopted European ones, just as did French men in western North America. Women acted as intermediaries between local and foreign cultures in other parts of the world as well, sometimes gaining great advantages for themselves and their children though their contact with dominant foreign- ers, though also sometimes suffering greatly as their contact with foreign- ers began when they were sold or given as gifts by their families or taken forcibly.21 Throughout much of the early modern colonial world a mestizo culture emerged in which not only ethnicity, but religions, family patterns, cultural traditions, and languages blended.22 Transnational history increas- ingly emphasizes mixture and hybridity as well as border-crossing; the majority of this scholarship has focused on the empires of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries or the globalized contemporary world, but early modern colonial settings provide some of the most significant examples.23 “Gender frontiers” were not only found in the colonies, however. In Strasbourg, the Lutheran city council debated in 1631 whether citizens should lose their citizenship if they married Calvinists. Such debates were common in many territories of the Holy Roman Empire after the middle of the sixteenth century. Earlier, most reformers had decided that religious conversion did not give one the right to leave one’s spouse. One could pray he or she would see the light, but not leave. The later debates were about marriage formation, however, not about changes in marriages that already existed. Should people be allowed to marry across religious lines? In general, the answer was no. Spouses were to be (quoting city councils here)

21 See the essays by Verena Stolcke on the Atlantic World, Barbara Andaya on Southeast Asia, and Marcia Wright on Africa in Teresa A. Meade and Merry E. Wiesner- Hanks, eds., A Companion to Gender History (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004). 22 This has been best studied in early modern Latin America. See Maria Elena Martinez, “The Black Blood of New Spain: Limpieza de sangre, Racial Violence, and Gendered Power in Early Colonial Mexico,” The William and Mary Quarterly 61/3 (July 2004): 479–520; Susan Kellogg, “Depicting ‘mestizaje’: Gendered Images of Ethnorace in Colonial Mexican Texts,” Journal of Women’s History 12/3 (2000): 69–92; Magal M. Carrera, Imagining Identity in New Spain: Race, Lineage, and the Colonial Body in Portraiture and Casta Paintings (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003). 23 Peter Burke, Cultural Hybridity (London: Polity, 2009) provides an excellent brief introduction to current and past thinking about mixture.

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“one in body and spirit,” and a mixed marriage would create “one body and two minds” and “cause arguments, quarrels, blasphemous wild conduct, and often half-hearted belief.” Authorities ordered sermons to be preached against mixed marriage, warning of the dangers to the soul “seduced by the infamous sweet poison of heretical teaching.”24 Even the body might be endangered, as Lutheran blood mixed with Calvinist blood, or, even worse, Catholic blood mixed with Protestant blood. The Strasbourg city council largely agreed with this, but, like all early modern authorities, they also worried about unmarried women, those “masterless” women free to saunter about the city and spend their wages on frivolous things. So they decided that a Lutheran man who married a Calvinist woman would not lose his citizenship because (in the words of the council) “he can probably draw his spouse away from her false religion and bring her on the correct path,” though he would have to pay a fine for “bringing an unacceptable person into the city.” A woman who married a Calvinist would lose her citizenship, however, “because she would let herself easily be led into error in religion by her husband and be led astray.”25 Thus the gender frontier of Strasbourg also became a gendered frontier, in which notions of male and female honor and sexuality shaped state policies about difference and intermarriage, just as they did in French Canada and French Louisiana. This did not end with the early modern era, of course. Ann Stoler has noted the ways in which “patterns of colonial intimacies in early America” were replicated in later colonial settings, which her own work and that of Antoinette Burton, Francis Gouda, and many others examines.26 Similarly,

24 German church ordinances, quoted in Dagmar Freist, “One Body, Two Confessions: Mixed Marriages in Germany,” in Ulinka Rublack, ed., Gender in Early Modern German History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 282, 287. See also David Warren Sabean, Simon Teuscher, and Jon Mathieu, eds., Kinship in Europe: Approaches to Long-term Development (1300–1900) (New York: Berghahn, 2007). 25 Records of the Strasbourg XXI, translated and quoted in Merry E. Wiesner, Working Women in Renaissance Germany (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1986), 20. 26 Ann L. Stoler, “Tense and Tender Ties: The Politics of Comparison in North American History and (post) Colonial studies,” Journal of American History 88/3 (2001): 829–65; quotation on p. 841. See also idem., Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule, 2nd ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011)

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Dagmar Herzog comments about contemporary Europe: “The entire complex of issues surrounding European identities and citizenships, with all the accompanying assumptions about appropriate inclusions and exclu- sions, now rests with remarkable frequency on sex-related concerns.”27 Not only did early modern patterns of interaction shape those of later eras, but the movement and interconnections that characterized the period also shaped the experiences of people who did not move an inch, for any fixed location can be saturated with transnational relationships. The migration of large numbers of men, for example, had an influence on gender structures in the areas they left as well as those to which they moved. Two thirds of the slaves carried across the Atlantic from Africa were male, with female slaves more likely to become part of the trans-Saharan trade or to stay in West Africa. This change reinforced polygyny, because slave women could join households as secondary wives, thus increasing the wealth and power of their owner/husbands through their work and children.28 (They were often favored as wives over free women because they were far away from their birth families, which could thus not interfere in a husband’s decisions). In parts of Europe, male migration also contributed to a gender imbalance among certain social groups. Because Christianity and Judaism did not allow polygyny, solutions were more difficult than in Africa. Male migration may have contributed to the entry of more women into convents in Catholic areas, or to dowries reaching the stratospheric heights they did for wealthy families in Italian cities, which itself led to more women being

and Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006); Tony Ballantyne and Antoinette Burton, eds., Bodies in Contact: Rethinking Colonial Encounters in World History (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), and idem, Moving Subjects: Gender, Mobility, and Intimacy in an Age of Global Empire (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009); Julia Clancy-Smith and Frances Gouda, eds., Domesticating the Empire: Race, Gender, and Family Life in French and Dutch Colonialism (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1997); Durba Ghosh, Sex and the Family in Colonial India: The Making of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Phillipa Levine, ed., Gender and Empire (Oxford : Oxford University Press, 2007). 27 Dagmar Herzog, “Syncopated Sex: Transforming European Sexual Cultures,” American Historical Review 114/5 (2009), 1305. 28 Jennifer Morgan, Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004).

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sent to convents.29 In Protestant areas, male travel and migration reinforced the existing pattern of late marriage and large numbers of women who remained single, which has been studied by a number of historians.30 Thus, through our work on cross-border relationships, hybrid social structures and cultural institutions, and intensified forms of hierarchy in local and global settings, scholars of early modern women, gender, and sexuality have much to contribute to the new transnational discussions. In addition, we have long engaged in another border-crossing process that transnational scholars view as a hallmark of their enterprise: crossing the borders between disciplines. Michael Werner and Bénédicte Zimmermann have noted that a central feature of transnational history is a “multiplicity of possible viewpoints and the divergences resulting from languages, ter- minologies, categorizations and conceptualizations, traditions, and disci- plinary usages.”31 This might serve equally well as a description of both the Society for Early Modern Women and its journal, in which interdisciplin- arity and multivocality have been both an aim and a reality.

29 Jutta Gisela Sperling, Convents and the Body Politic in Renaissance Venice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000); P. Renée Baernstein, A Convent Tale: A Century of Sisterhood in Spanish Milan (New York: Routledge, 2002); Mary Laven, Virgins of Venice: Broken Vows and Cloistered Lives in the Renaissance Convent (New York: Penguin, 2004). 30 Judith M. Bennett and Amy M. Froide, eds., Single Women in the European Past (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998); Bridget Hill, Women Alone: Spinsters in England, 1660–1850 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001); Amy M. Froide, Never Married: Single Women in Early Modern England (New York: Oxford, 2005). 31 Michael Werner and Bénédicte Zimmermann, “Beyond Comparison: Histoire croisée and the Challenge of Reflexivity,” History and Theory 45 (February 2006): 30. Werner and Zimmermann distinguish between transnational history and their notion of histoire croisée, but most definitions of transnational history are broad enough to include everything that they view as a hallmark of histoire croisée.

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