Session Abstract

Inspired by Jacqueline Broad and Karen Green’s broad examination of women’s political thought from 1400-1700, this proposed panel brings to light examples of early modern women engaged in political debate. Broad and Green highlight the fact that in spite of the obstacles that prevented most women from attaining an education and administrative positions, many women were:

…self-educated, some attained the highest levels of government and political authority, others were counselors and companions to queens; many wrote political commentaries in the guise of religious or prophetical works, and many of them defended their writings with appeal to biblical and secular precedent. (Broad and Green, A History of Women’s Political Thought in Europe, 1400-1700. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009, viii).

This panel will offer a study of some of the ways women wielded power and engaged in political debate in the mid-sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Two of our papers focus on women’s exercise of influence through formal institutions. Annalena Müller examines how a French abbess expanded her powers over the double-order of Fontevraud through the development of a ‘gender-blind’ political-theological theory favoring abbatial rule that borrowed from the arguments of Jean Bodin. Irene Olivares employs the example of Leocadia de Illescas, the wealthy widow of a Spanish soldier living in the Philippines, to explore colonial women’s participation in governance through her 1634 petition to Spanish Habsburg king Philip IV.

The remaining papers expose how two other groups of women exercise unofficial influence on public policy. Amanda Pipkin focuses on Dutch Protestant women’s political poetry and pamphlets to reveal that women brazenly offered their political opinions in print using religious language and were authorized to do so in part because contemporaries recognized the important role women played in seventeenth-century Protestant reform movements. Megan Moran explains how patrician women from merchant class families used gossip to create patronage networks through letters with family members and friends and argues that women transformed personal relationships into political ties in order to engage in civic and political life in early modern Italian society. 

            By combining these diverse examples we will be able to compare women’s distinctly different experiences in Catholic and Protestant countries, in formal and unofficial roles, and in France, Spain, the Philippines, the Dutch Republic, and Italy. These papers highlight the continuing religious influence of women after the Reformation in both Catholic and Protestant nations, women’s capacity to exercise power in spite of being barred from most official positions of power, and further elucidates women’s capacity to exercise power within the family state compact.