Project description
Rescuing the intellectual value of women’s ideas in texts from the past
The recovery of early modern literature has unearthed extraordinary works, most of which have come from male writers. This is because a lot of women’s writings from the 16th to 18th centuries have either been ignored, neglected or unrecorded. The EU-funded WINK project aims to change this and modify the single-gender paradigm of intellectual value. To do this, the project will locate, identify and examine the neglected women’s production in early European modernity and provide a model for the intellectual recovery of their work in several languages.
Objective
Literature scholars have succeeded in recovering texts by early modern women from different languages, genres, and sociopolitical contexts. Still, compared to their male counterparts, few women writers feature in national canons, or they compose a separate set of ‘early modern women writers’. A nuanced qualitative approach to their textual production reveals forms of self-taught, intellectually-minded trans-genre discourse (traversing poetry, drama, prose, novels) traditionally deemed irrelevant as it did not conform to a practice of scholarly male-dominated discourse. Thus, much original thinking by women has remained intact even if their texts are available to us.
The proposed research locates, identifies and examines the invisible written production of women in early European modernity in order to modify the single-gender paradigm of intellectual value. It surveys sources in six languages through a methodology based on trans-genre writing rather than on close genre types, allowing patterns of persuasive argumentation to emerge as intellectual input, while exposing the rhetorical models that have impinged on the social and cognitive processes identifying intellectual value as being androcentric.
The main research unfolds in three strands: 1) Synergies, examining religious and life-writing themes that shaped into ethical discourses on the common good. 2) Cloud intertextualities, tracing fragmented chains of intuitive argument in discursive narrative. 3) Textual porosity, understanding patterns of knowledge transference and authorial attribution in the management of sources.
The research outcomes will render co-authored articles, a virtual space environment as the reservoir and task field for comparative textual analysis, and a four-volume collection on the cultural history of textual misogyny. WINK approaches intellectual value as a category of gender analysis, bringing to light transformative thinking from understudied and underrepresented women authors.
Fields of science
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
- humanitiesphilosophy, ethics and religionphilosophyepistemology
- humanitieshistory and archaeologyhistorymedieval history
- humanitieslanguages and literatureliterature studiesliterary genres
- humanitiesother humanitieslibrary sciencesknowledge organization
- humanitieslanguages and literatureliterature studieshistory of literature
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Funding Scheme
ERC-STG - Starting GrantHost institution
08193 Cerdanyola Del Valles
Spain