16thc – Women's Studies Group 1558

WSG seminar series 2020-21

The Women’s Studies Group 1558-1837 is pleased to announce the speakers for their seminar series 2020-21. All meetings will start promptly at 1pm BST/GMT* (with arrivals from 12.30 onward to allow for necessary preparations and administration). We aim to finish by 3.30pm.

Please be aware, you must be a member of the WSG to gain access to the Zoom sessions. The links are distributed through our WSG mailing list 24-hours before the event. Becoming a member means you will be able to attend the Zoom and in-person seminars for the 2020-2021 season.

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September 19, 2020*
Stephen Spiess: Reading Strumpets: Thomas Heywood, Sexual Epistemology, and the Making of English Whoredom
Sonia Villegas Lopez: Female Libertinism in Gabriel de Brémond’s Transnational Oriental Fictions.
Anthony Walker-Cook: Descending into the Underworld with Mary Leapor and Sarah Fielding.

November 21, 2020
Rocio Martinez: To defend a princess’s rights to her father’s throne: Maria Theresia of Austria and the protestations against her renunciation of the inheritance of the Spanish Monarchy.
Avleen Grewal: Vathek: Gaze, Disorientations and Policing Identity.
Eva Lippold: Marriage and Magic Swords: Mariana Starke’s Factual Fairytale.

December 5, 2020
Daniel Beaumont: Melancholy and Despair among Early Modern English Women: A case study of Hannah Allen’s Satan’s Methods and Malice Baffled (1683).
Yvonne Noble: Elizabeth Elstob, Mary Delany, and Money.
Valerie Schutte: Popular Literature at the Accession of Queen Mary.

January 23, 2021
Megan Shaw: Looking towards a cultural history of Katherine Villiers, Duchess of Buckingham (1603-1649).
Gillian Beattie-Smith: Catherine Helen Spence: a consideration of her feminist and transnational agency.
Kate Stephenson: Lawyers, Débardeuses and Pages; Women Masquerading as Men.

February 20, 2021
Sarah Ailwood: ‘In justice to myself’: Legal and Textual Subjectivities in Eighteenth-Century Women’s Memoirs.
Daisy Winter: “I who am but dust”: mortal fear in Elizabeth Delaval’s ‘Memoirs and Meditations’.
Valentina Aparicio: Maria Graham’s Journal of a residence in Chile (1824): a transnational community of women.

March 20, 2021 Cheryll Duncan: ‘Much want of judgment’: new evidence concerning the singer Jane Barbier.
Maria Clara Pivate Biajoli: Understanding Current Readers’ Reception of Jane Austen through Fan Fiction. Miriam al Jamil: The Grand Duchess of Tuscany’s Birth Days: Weary and Waiting at the Florentine Court.

April 17, 2021*

Julie Vig: Women and martiality in the Sikh literature of early modern Punjab.
Francesca Saggini: ‘From St Martin’s Street to “Camilla Cottage.” Frances Burney’s Houses between Fact and Fantasy.’

Anna Jamieson: “Comforts in her Calamity”: Dorothea Fellowes’s Shopping and Spending in the late Eighteenth-Century Private Madhouse.

*Please note that the September and April meetings are BST, and the rest are GMT.

For further information including abstracts, see our seminars page, or contact the organiser Carolyn D. Williams. To join the WSG, see our membership page.

WSG members visit the National Portrait Gallery

Many thanks to WSG member Carolyn D. Williams for writing the following report on this fascinating visit. Karen Hearn will be giving a tour of her upcoming exhibition, Pregnancy Portraits, 1130am, Saturday, 15th February 2020 and if you would like to attend the tour, please send an expression of interest to Miriam Al Jamil.

On Thursday, 3 October 2019, Karen Hearn and Helen Hackett gave the National Portrait Gallery’s lunchtime lecture, on the appearance of Queen Elizabeth I at 60. WSG members were reminded of this by email and the website, and those of us who attended were treated to a presentation that was just as thought-provoking and informative as you would expect from this pairing. They alternated every few minutes, with each speaker focussing mainly on her areas of particular expertise: Helen told us a lot about written records, while Karen concentrated on the more practical details of the materials and methods used to create early modern portraits (which sometimes overlapped dangerously with the materials and methods used to apply early modern make-up). Nevertheless, it quickly became obvious from the slickness of the dovetailing that each presenter was well versed in the relevant aspects of the other’s disciplinary field.
They paid due attention to events in and around 1593, including contemporary perceptions of Elizabeth I as a waning moon, and fears about what might happen when this virgin queen died without having given birth to, or even named, a successor. They also examined more recent attitudes to her, including nineteenth-century comparisons with Queen Victoria, where the former is considered an evil tyrant and the latter a model monarch (because of her role as wife and mother). I was reminded of Louise Duckling’s conclusion to Exploring the Lives of Women 1558-1837, which draws similar comparisons, and also uses visual material to support the argument.

The most challenging element of the presentation consisted of Elizabeth I’s appearance in pictures, films, and television programmes, where she often becomes a Gothic monstrosity, with a dead white complexion, a bald pate covered by a series of unconvincing red wigs, and appalling teeth that would have fallen out years before if they had been real. These portrayals sometimes seem to have been executed without paying any attention to the date of the incident depicted: whether she was in her 40s, 50s or 60s, illustrators, performers and make-up artists have endowed Elizabeth I with perpetual, and exceptionally grotesque, old age. Perhaps this could all be accounted for by carelessness or ignorance. Anybody who attended this lecture could have learned, for example, that wearing wigs was not a sign of baldness, but a fashion that had become popular among the upper classes since the middle of the sixteenth century, when women’s hair was no longer concealed. They could also have learned that the dead white complexion to be found in so many sixteenth-century portraits was not intended by the artists, who would have added touches of vermilion: unfortunately, the vermilion has usually faded over time. As for those terrible teeth, well, yes, they were pretty bad by the end of her life, and she had lost so many on the left side of her face that her speech was indistinct, but at least she kept her slim, girlish figure to the last, due to a regimen of diet and exercise. But maybe these depictions of Elizabeth are not just mistakes. We are left wondering whether they indicate enduring hostility to older women with power.

WSG seminar series 2019-20

The Women’s Studies Group 1558-1837 is pleased to announce the speakers for their seminar series 2019-20. All seminars will take place at the Foundling Museum, 40 Brunswick Square, WC1N 1AZ, starting promptly at 1pm and finishing at 4pm. Doors open at 12.30. All seminars are free and open to the public, though refreshments will cost £2 to those who aren’t WSG members. The Foundling is a wheelchair accessible venue, and directions for getting to the Museum can be found here, including for those who are partially sighted. Those attending the seminars are welcome to look round the museum afterwards.

Saturday 21 September, 2019. Chairs Gillian Williamson and Carolyn D. Williams
Charmian Kenner: Sarah Andrews: furthering the cause of Latin American independence in early 19^th century London
Sonia Villegas López: Female libertinism in Gabriel de Brémond’s transnational oriental fictions
Rebecca Simpson: Scandal and the Maternal Imagination in Eighteenth-Century Britain: The Confessions of Mary Toft [WSG Bursary awardee, 2018]
Alison Daniell: Of False Hair, Bolstered Hips and Witchcraft: The Regulation of Women’s Bodies and an Act of Parliament that Never Was

Saturday 23 November, 2019. Chairs Miriam al Jamil and Felicity Roberts
Masuda Qureshi: Celestial Revolutions: Hester Pulter and the circular skies.
Natasha Simonova: ‘Semiramis does not stand still’: Amabel Polwarth and Amateur Authorship
John Beddoes: Anna, Emmeline and Maria Edgeworth, Three Sisters of the Enlightenment: “I do not wish to be the cause of one of your tight laced faces.”
Francesca Saggini: Below and Beyond. On Re-reading Burney’s Biographies

Saturday 18 January, 2020. Chairs Angela Escott and Miriam al Jamil
Charlotte Young: Women’s involvement in Canterbury sequestrations, 1643-1650 [WSG Bursary winner, 2019]
Carol Stewart: Penelope Aubin’s The Noble Slaves and the Politics of Opposition
Anne Stott: Princess Charlotte of Wales: gender and the “reversionary interest”
Katherine Woodhouse: “Madam Smith says, what shou’d the Captain do with such a wife as me who can only sit with a book in her hand”
Anna Jamieson: Madness Exhibited: The Margaret Nicholson Scandal

Saturday 21 March, 2020. Chairs Carolyn D. Williams and Angela Escott
Lindy Moore: The Scottish Schoolmistress in the Eighteenth Century
Alexis Wolf: Women and Mentoring in the Late Eighteenth Century: Mary Wollstonecraft, Margaret King and Mary Shelley
Rachel Eckersley: Female benefactors to dissenting academies in England
Catriona Wilson: “Some attention to those female members”: Feminised monarchy in the first exhibition of Kensington Palace’s State Apartments, 1899

For further information including abstracts, see our seminars page, or contact the organiser Carolyn D. Williams. To join the WSG, see our membership page.

Cfp WSG Seminars 2019-20

Established in the 1980s, the Women’s Studies Group 1558-1837 is an informal, multidisciplinary group which promotes in the study of women and gender in the early modern period and long eighteenth century. The group enables members to keep in touch, to hear about one another’s research and publications, and to meet regularly to discuss relevant topics, including at regular weekend seminars and an annual workshop at the Foundling Museum. We can offer advice and opportunities to engage in activities that increase opportunities for publication, or enhance professional profiles in other ways.

For our 2019-20 seminars, we invite papers related to any aspect of women’s and gender studies: not only women writers, but any activity of a woman or women in the period of our concern, or anything that affects or is affected by women in this period, such as the law, religion, etc. Papers tackling aspects of women’s studies within or alongside the wider histories of gender and sexuality are particularly welcome. We would also welcome how-to presentations for discussion: examples of suitable topics would include, but are not limited to, applying for grants, setting up research networks, becoming a curator, co-authorship, using specialised data, and writing about images. Papers should be about 20-25 minutes. The closing date for applications is 20 May 2019.

The seminar dates are:

Saturday 21 September, 2019, 1-4pm
Saturday 23 November, 2019, 1-4pm
Saturday 18 January, 2020, 1-4pm
Saturday 21 March, 2020, 1-4pm

The full address for the Foundling Museum is 40 Brunswick Square, London, WC1N 1AZ. It is a wheelchair accessible venue and there are further access directions including directions for partially-sighted visitors here. We are allowed into the room at 12.30pm to give us time to sort out paperwork and technology, but sessions will run from 1-4pm. So please arrive a little early if you can.

The WSG is open to women, men and non-binary people, students, faculty, and independent scholars, all of whom are invited to join our group and to give papers.

Find out more about us at https://womensstudiesgroup.org

Check the Book section for progress on Exploring the Lives of Women

Please reply to WSG seminars organiser Carolyn D. Williams at cdwilliamslyle@aol.com

Reminder: Booking still open for WSG seminar and book launch 8 December

A reminder that the special Women’s Studies Group 1558-1837 seminar takes place 8 December, when WSG launches its 30th anniversary collection, Exploring the Lives of Women 1558-1837 (Pen & Sword Books, 2018) at the Foundling Museum, London. Reserve your place now to hear a special set of papers, ‘Women’s and Gender Studies in 2018 and Beyond’, drink a glass of wine (or soft drink), and get a copy of the book.

Speakers are:

Louise Duckling: Exploring the Lives of Women, 1558-1837: A Journey in Images
Bernadette Andrea: ‘English Daughters’ in Eighteenth-Century Morocco: Abjection and Assimilation in the Narratives of Thomas Pellow and Elizabeth Marsh
Felicity Roberts: The Academic Precariat: Writing Women’s History Now

Seminars take place at the Foundling Museum, 40 Brunswick Square, WC1N 1AZ, starting promptly at 1pm (doors open 12.30pm) and finishing at 4pm. The Foundling is a wheelchair accessible venue, and directions for getting to the Museum can be found here, including for those who are partially sighted. This seminar will be a parent and baby-friendly event.