Revisiting the Seventeenth-Century Republic of Letters

Project Information

REVERE

Grant agreement ID: 841036

DOI

10.3030/841036

Project closed

EC signature date 26 April 2019

Start date 1 October 2019

End date 30 September 2021

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions

Total cost

€ 172 932,48

EU contribution

€ 172 932,48

Coordinated by

UNIVERSIDAD POMPEU FABRA
Spain

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - REVERE (Revisiting the Seventeenth-Century Republic of Letters)

Reporting period: 2019-10-01 to 2021-09-30

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

The project examines the writer’s career in Spanish and English within the seventeenth-century Republic of Letters (as contemporaries across borders called the literary field), with a focus on women publishing as “professional” authors and as scholars, since the view of the marginality of the woman author in the early modern literary field continues to be pervasive. Extending the investigation of the writer’s career across genders and geo-linguistic boundaries was imperative to have an informed picture of the extent and implications of the mobility of print culture in this period: transnational studies exploring the cross-cultural mobility of public texts, particularly those including female authorship, are still a small minority, while their ambitions never concretely investigate how authorial and editorial practices interact with each other; most specialists continue to structure their discussions according to gender, theme, period, geography, or language, thereby obscuring broader diachronic trends towards women’s increasing participation in the professional world of authorship. In so doing, the project makes an original contribution to gender studies and book history by elucidating the consolidation of women’s position as authors through print within the transnational study of authorial and editorial practices in seventeenth-century Europe. Additionally, the project introduces the work of seventeenth-century women authors and its cross-cultural dimension to a general audience, to underline the importance of past authoritative models of female agency and their connection to present ones in raising awareness of women’s place in cultural history —namely, via podcasts, exhibitions, and public talks with round table discussions—, which can be integrated in university or school curricula. The diversity offered by the textual corpus doubtless helps the audience’s direct engagement with the research, while similarities in the books’ material and discursive properties helps raise a collective awareness of a shared European heritage of popular culture, which appeals to the general audience’s sense of communitarian belonging. In short, the project brings new understanding of the process of commercialization as the book trade developed in the seventeenth century and evaluates the effects of the mobility of print from one culture to another by exploring how authorial and editorial practices in literary production interlink and flow.

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

Below is an overview of what was accomplished due to the ongoing, severe pressures threatening the successful completion of the project, not least the restrictions imposed by the Covid-19 pandemic:
'TALKS
‘Gendering Readers, Authors, and Translators through Print, 1670-1700’, CIRGEN conference, Gender, Modernities, and the Global Enlightenment, 23 February 2022, Universitat de València.
*'Ingenio femenino y beneplácito en la República literaria áurea’, online conference, La mujer y los universos femeninos en las fuentes documentales de la Edad Moderna, 28-30 June 2021, HISPANIA Universidade da Coruña, in collaboration with GRISO, Universidad de Navarra.
‘De género, autoría e imprenta en el Barroco’, Pre-recorded masters lecture within MECLAP, 8 June 2021, Universitat Pompeu Fabra.
‘On Teaching Methodology: Early Modern Female Authorship for Specialists’, AHGBI virtual annual conference, 30 March 2021, University College Dublin.
‘Erudición y lucro en la República literaria barroca: a propósito de María de Zayas’, Journee d’Etude En-Ligne, Las novelas amorosas y ejemplares de María de Zayas, 8 January 2021, École Normale Supérieure de Lyon.
‘Gender, Scholarly Identity, and Collective Memory in the Republic of Letters: The Cases of Luisa Sigea and Margaret Cavendish’, SKILLNET conference, Memory and Identity in the Learned World: Community Formation in the Early Modern World of Science and Learning, 7-9 November 2019, Utrecht University.
PUBLICATIONS
‘Erudición y lucro en la República literaria barroca’, Criticón, Special Issue, Las novelas amorosas y ejemplares de María de Zayas. Forthcoming.
‘Scholarly Identity and Gender in the Respublica litteraria: The Cases of Luisa Sigea and Margaret Cavendish’, in Memory and Identity in the Learned World: Community Formation in the Early Modern World of Learning and Science, ed. Koen Scholten, Dirk van Miert, and Karl A.E. Enenkel, Intersections: Interdisciplinary Studies in Early Modern Culture (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2022). N.B. It will be published in March.
‘Décima moradora del Parnaso: Género y tolerancia en la República literaria de la primera modernidad’, in Historia de la tolerancia en España, eds. Ricardo García Cárcel and Eliseo Serrano Martín (Madrid: Cátedra, 2021), pp. 171-83.
TRAINING
‘Literatura del Siglo de Oro’. Online undergraduate lectures on early modern Spanish literature (80 students). Universitat Pompeu Fabra, 1 April–30 September 2021.
‘De nociones y prácticas literarias premodernas: en voz de mujer’. Research-led online undergraduate seminars, focusing on seventeenth-century women’s textual production in Spanish (160 students). Universitat Pompeu Fabra, 1 April–30 September 2020.
‘Palaeography and Latin’, online course, led by Dr Ana de Oliveira Dias and Dr Sigbjørn Sønnesyn at the Institute of Medieval and Early Modern Studies (IMEMS), University of Durham, 7-19 December 2020.
‘Estudios de Género y Sexualidad’. Masters course (17 students). Universitat Pompeu Fabra, 1 April–30 September 2019.

Once the fellowship ended, the host university, in agreement with the Project Officer, provided me with a contract until July 2022, using the expenses money, to complete some of the outstanding fieldwork and the secondment. Below is an overview of the undergoing project tasks:
SECONDMENT (October 2021-present)
Training in Digital Humanities in the form of two online MA courses, led by Dr Rob Miller and Dr Adam Crymble: ‘Intro to Digital Humanities’ and ‘Database in Theory and Practice’, respectively.
OUTPUTS AND DISSEMINATION
An open-access, bibliographic website, provisionally entitled, Authorial and Editorial Strategies in Seventeenth-Century Print Publications in English, Portuguese, and Spanish.
'The Seventeenth-Century Respublica Litteraria’, a one-day conference on seventeenth-century authors, male and female, due to take place in October 2022 (date to be confirmed) at UCL’s Centre for Early Modern Exchanges.
‘Texts in Motion: Foreign Models, Translation, and Print Authorship in Seventeenth-Century England’, public seminar due to take place in June 2022 (date to be confirmed) at UCL’s Centre for Early Modern Exchanges.
‘Publishing Guzmán de Alfarache in English: Vernacular Authorship, Translation, and Print in the Seventeenth Century’, paper to be presented at the RSA annual conference, 1 April 2022, University College Dublin, Ireland.
A monograph, provisionally entitled, Revisiting the Respublica litteraria: A Comparative, Transnational Study of Knowledge Practices Through Anglo and Luso-Hispanic Print, is now under contract with Brill —the preliminary contract was negotiated in late December 2021.

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)

Despite the unfortunate circumstances, it is my intention to materialize some of the expected impacts at the first available opportunity, not least the creation of a series of podcasts and some talks at schools. That is to say, once my writing up and conference are completed.

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