Early Modern Women Writers in Europe

Why are women so often underrepresented in the history of ideas? The EMWW series addresses this question by examining the textual, cultural, and historical factors that led to the marginalization of women’s thought in the early modern period (1450-1750), at a time when the printing press favoured a massive dissemination of printed material in Europe. The series invites monographs and edited collections that survey little-known texts composed by women and explores the relevance of their intellectual content. In so doing, we can trace a genealogy of neglected thinking, shedding new light on these works, their originality, and the wider historical reception. Emphasis is thus given to the ways in which the rich corpus of women’s writing contributed to shaping fundamental debates at all levels of early modern European thought, rather than focusing on individual and anecdotal case studies.

This series combines textual recovery, analysis, and historical contextualization in order to assess and readdress the specific cultural paradigms that have up to now led to a scholarly neglect of ideas developed by women. Volumes within the series treat intellectual value as a category of gender analysis, thus seeking to fully integrate women and their writings into the systems of knowledge production and transmission in the early modern European tradition. This multidisciplinary approach is conversant with gender studies, as well as the history of ideas, philosophy, and cognition studies.