Women's Invisible Ink: Trans-Genre Writing and the Gendering of Intellectual Value in Early Modernity

Project Information

WINK

Grant agreement ID: 805436

DOI

10.3030/805436

Project closed

EC signature date 2 October 2018

Start date 1 March 2019

End date 28 February 2025

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - European Research Council (ERC)

Total cost

€ 1 489 550,00

EU contribution

€ 1 489 550,00

Coordinated by

UNIVERSITAT AUTONOMA DE BARCELONA
Spain

Periodic Reporting for period 4 - WINK (Women's Invisible Ink: Trans-Genre Writing and the Gendering of Intellectual Value in Early Modernity)

Reporting period: 2023-09-01 to 2025-02-28

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

WINK has examined the historical and cultural dynamics underlying the marginalization of women’s written contributions to the history of ideas, focusing on the early modern period (1500–1750), a time marked by the professionalization of the writing market in Europe. The ground-breaking and high-risk nature of WINK’s research has yielded a model for the intellectual recovery of early modern women’s writing, one that reconstructs genealogies of knowledge across languages and genres, thereby reshaping literary historiography and contributing to epistemic balance.
WINK has coined new concepts and methods to address the vast production of texts by women in Europe’s modern past, challenging traditional literary histories and national ‘canons’ of what constitutes literature. The project's true impact on literary and gender studies lies in its methodological innovation, engaging with textual productions—from domestic manuscripts to religious devotional writings and life-writing narratives—that have been largely absent from previous accounts. WINK has introduced conceptual models and terminology to describe previously invisible cultural production processes, such as ‘genealogies of knowledge’, ‘textual misogyny’ ‘epistemic balance,’ and ‘androcentric condition’, which remain relevant today. It has provided a long-missing substratum for modifying existing knowledge models and ontologies of literary representation and circulation, enabling a fuller understanding of how women evaluated and interpreted the world around them. This has transformed the field of women’s writing within literary studies and cultural heritage, laying the groundwork for research that is sensitive to ‘lost’ textualities. The research outcomes align fully with WINK’s main objective: shifting the focus from the woman writer to her text. Rather than attributing the underrepresentation of women’s thought solely to socio-political factors, WINK reveals how the traditions and habituation of male discourse have perpetuated androcentric cognition. The project approaches neglected works by women not only as intangible intellectual legacies but also as tangible cultural assets. The connection between the two brings both innovation and social benefit—enhancing public understanding of gender imbalance in our knowledge models and contributing to the mission of the cultural heritage sector and industry, particularly in the areas of preservation and education.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

WINK’s research has developed through four main action points:

1. Providing a model for the intellectual recovery of early modern women’s writing that reconstructs genealogies of knowledge across languages and genres, and reshapes literary historiography to attain epistemic balance. Our monograph Early Modern Women and Social Change (2025), along with the establishment of the new book series Early Modern Women Writers in Europe: Texts, Debates, and Genealogies of Knowledge, reflects an emphasis on textual and intellectual recovery that moves beyond a focus on authorship.

2. Designing the WINK database, which compiles over 200 sources as a pilot—not as a static repository, but as an active platform built to extract and visualize genealogies. This represents a significant challenge in terms of presenting source information while foregrounding the intellectual contributions of the authors.

3. Rethinking ontologies and systems of knowledge organization related to early modern women’s cultural production, through concepts such as textual misogyny, androcentric cognition, intellectual value, and epistemic balance. Our special issue Early Modern Textual Misogynies examines the cultural dynamics underlying these processes and the specific ways they shaped women’s writing.

4. Unveiling previously overlooked silos and corpora of women’s textual production that had been deemed irrelevant due to genre or topic. These include, for example, the extensive and informal body of women's religious writings that engaged with science and cosmology, or texts associated with emerging forms of domesticity. We have explored how these hybrid textual forms and genres constitute valuable cultural knowledge, as examined in our monograph Genre Hybridity and Women's Writing in Eighteenth-Century Europe.

The project is strong and distinctive in its qualitative, conceptual, and close-reading analysis of sources. This is reflected in outcomes that have exceeded our initial expectations: four monographs, one special issue, and over thirty articles and book chapters. Dissemination has been effective, both through WINK Labs as hubs for dialogue within the broader research community (including visiting scholars, pre- and postdoctoral researchers) and through invited seminars abroad (primarily within international partnerships).
Two major conferences—held at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and the University of Edinburgh—have concentrated efforts on broader thematic inquiries (Domesticity, Missing Matter), complemented by high-profile roundtables (e.g. Renaissance Society of America, Chicago 2024), exhibits (Palermo), public engagement talks (e.g. at the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona), and both international (BBC) and local media outreach. Our research has inspired other scholars and projects to apply WINK’s trans-genre methodology to distinct datasets across various fields, including philosophy, literature, history, and religion.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

The combination of thorough research with a true methodological leap—rather than merely incremental progress—defines the spirit of WINK’s work. Our publications result from examining recovered sources through WINK's novel methodology, which not only disseminates but also transforms the way we approach women’s neglected textualities and lost knowledge more broadly. We focused our efforts on recovery and methodological innovation with the aim of achieving a leap forward, not just a step ahead. In this sense, the results are fully consistent with the project’s objectives.
The concepts of Epistemic Balance and, in particular, Intellectual Value and Textual Misogyny are original contributions coined by WINK. Our goal was not to be exhaustive—recovering women’s writing cannot be completed within five years—but to be consistent and transformative, offering a model that can be applied across diverse contexts and within the ongoing cycles of research and scholarly projects. In this respect, our methodology constitutes a solid foundation, while remaining open to revision and expansion.
We also encountered a number of unexpected findings. For instance, the extensive and informal production of women's religious writings engaged with science and cosmology warrants detailed analysis. Similarly, the topic of domesticity, broadly conceived, requires further breakdown, as it challenges prevailing epistemic models of what counts as ‘valuable knowledge.’
At the same time, we have expanded, valorized, and extended WINK’s results into two complementary areas: research and instruction, and policy reporting on the historical and social construction of feminisms in Europe—understood as a core value of European social and political development. This has been made possible through a European Commission Jean Monnet action, which supports the continued projection of WINK’s findings into the public and social spheres.

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