Tag: review

Danish-British Consort Portraiture, c.1600–1900. By Sara Ayres. London: Lund Humphries. 2023. pp. 176. £60.00 (hardback), ISBN 9781848225183. Review by Miriam al Jamil.

The title of this superbly illustrated book ostensibly indicates an overview of a specific group of royal portraits, produced over the course of three hundred years. An unusual focus on consorts who united the Danish and British royal families through marriage reveals the deep bonds between European dynasties, but also presents exemplary models for the author’s argument across otherwise broad and unmanageable periods of time. The book remains disciplined and centred, while at the same time offering a variety of evidence and new readings to make it a compelling and authoritative contribution to art history and visual culture. The chosen cover image, if unfamiliar to the reader, is assumed to represent one of these royal individuals in eighteenth-century military costume and with all the expected accoutrements of assertive might and power. However, it is soon revealed to encapsulate the far more complex narrative of the book. It subverts our expectations and challenges us to reassess what a portrait can tell us.

The 1770 portrait by Peder Als shows Caroline Matilda of Great Britain (1751–1775), the daughter of Frederick, Prince of Wales and Princess Augusta of Saxe-Gotha, who was married to King Christian VII of Denmark. She wears the uniform of the Life Guards, with red coat, sash and spurs, and sword at her side, about to take her tricorn hat from the table and to stride out through an arched doorway to inspect a line of soldiers drawn to attention in the courtyard. Her story forms chapter four of the book. By then, the reader has followed the writer’s close readings of three other consort portraits and traced the postures, settings and iconography which connect them to tell a history of transformation in the art of embodying the royal image (p. 10). The portrayal of rank shifted into one based exclusively on gender, a shift which affects our ability to understand and interpret a portrait even today. The argument is original and intriguing, underscored by research references drawn from a broad range of visual culture and historical sources, in particular Walter Benjamin’s writings on the work of art in an age of technological reproducibility. The argument relies on detailed observation to find new connections. Of the five Danish royal consort subjects of this study, only one, Prince George of Denmark (1653–1708), is male, but the book aims to explore how the royal image “rhetorically incorporated the most functional, symbolic qualities of maleness and femaleness” (p.22). It centres on uncovering the “complex palimpsest” of royal portraiture as embodiment, centring on the 1617 Paul van Somer portrait of Anne of Denmark (Royal Collection Trust) as its starting point.

Anne’s full-length portrait incorporates elements of the traditional male hunting portrait, the horse, dogs and distant view of a royal palace and park, as part of her self-fashioning. It was importantly designed to “instruct and nurture” (p.44) her son Charles in the noble and princely arts necessary for kingship. Charles I’s dismounted equestrian portrait by Anthony van Dyck, dated to c.1635, can be construed as a pendant. The crooked elbow which features in these and later royal portraits is an important sign derived from emblem book symbols of female perfection. When added to examples of extended elbows in male portraits suggesting greater male heat and virility, a feature of the ancient four humours medical theory, it is clear that there was more gender fluidity and layered meaning in the royal portrait than we might have realised.

The book explores the construction of royal embodiment and its image through the physical nature of the medium. The discussion on Prince George of Denmark centres on his youthful Grand Tour which included England on its itinerary, and the shaping of a cultured and refined royal figure. The wax medium used for the clothed and wigged waxwork of the young prince by Antoine Benoist (undated), now in Rosenborg Palace, Copenhagen, indicates the pliable mind of the prince as he was prepared for a role of power. The advances in scientific and Cartesian methodology, while essential elements of a modern royal education, changed the nature of royal embodiment. Louisa (1724–1751), daughter of George II, married Crown Prince Frederick V of Denmark-Norway. Her death during a late stage in pregnancy was followed by an autopsy which her doctors described in detail, changing the sacral body into a pathological case study. As the author notes,“The artisanal epistemology that had been the province of the consort and the artist as they together crafted the contours of the royal body as a work of art now became the property of the man of medical sciences” (p.80). The work of the anatomist reinforced the changing balance of power and the female body was laid open to a newly authorised male gaze.

The final two chapters consolidate the narrative of change. The author offers a new interpretation of a scurrilous woodcut lampoon of Caroline Matilda, printed in 1772, which “heralds the hygienic exclusion of the influence of women from political, public life, regardless of their rank, and their exile en masse to the seclusion of the domestic sphere” (p.88). The crude woodcut shows the queen on horseback, alongside a nurse holding her baby, and a male figure looking out of a window. The queen is construed as an “unnatural, sexually incontinent woman” (p.87) in the tradition of world turned upside down satire. The author suggests that the nurse represents the king, “left holding the baby” (p.89), the offspring of the queen’s affair with Johann Friedrich Struensee, the king’s doctor and prime minister. The threat to the royal bloodline at the centre of the print and the failure of masculine authority is embodied in the subversive and unruly woman. However, the king approved of Caroline’s wearing male attire, so contrary to a simple reading of the satire, the author suggests “the queen’s transvestism [is] a performative fall into masculinity responding to the king’s desire”, and a form of “sympathetic magic of mimesis” which constitutes the “body of the absolute king for him” (p.100–101). This reading questions and complicates the satire, based on traditional forms of unruly female representation and possible interpretations. However, the final example of consort portraiture is taken from an age of reproduction by means of photography. The narrative was reinvented for a new audience with irreconcilable binary gendered expectations determining its reception.

Alexandra of Denmark (1844–1925) married Albert Edward, Prince of Wales, later Edward VII, in 1863. Her elaborate reception in the capital “created a topological phantasmagoria within which ancient ceremony and industrial modernity comingled” (p.113). The rise of the carte de visite form popularised the image of the consort but also enabled comparisons and imitations in its mass availability and reproducibility. Following this, “fashion and the photographic image” defined the image of the consort and made her “a visual commodity”, a development that has ultimately made the represented female body “simultaneously object and abject” (p.128). Though beyond the scope of the book, clear contemporary examples can be found in the consorts of the current British royal family. The book does not falter in its structured and thorough exploration. Each chapter contributes new material and builds on its central premise of change over several centuries. However, while the title is precise, the breadth of the subject may not be anticipated by the browser in a library or book shop. But the book is a rewarding study as part of the Northern Lights book series, and the portraits examined cannot be seen in isolation again.

Miriam Al Jamil is on the WSG committee, chairs the Burney Society UK, and is Fine Arts editor for BSECS Criticks online reviews. She has published on women travel writers, Horace Mann and his circle in Florence and Rome, on Frances Burney, and on Eleanor Coade. There will be a chapter on Coade in the forthcoming WSG book.

Elisabetta Sirani. By Adelina Modesti. London: Lund Humphries. 2023. Pp. 144 + 65 colour and 12 black and white illustrations. £35.00 (hardcover), ISBN 9781848224971. By Anna Pratley

This is the first of three reviews we will be publishing on the Illuminating Women Artists series, edited by Andrea Pearson and Marilyn Dunn, and published by Lund Humphries. The beautifully illustrated volumes in this series explore the lives and works of women artists, many of whom have been previously overlooked in the history of art. To begin, Anna Pratley discusses the volume on Elisabetta Sirani.

 *******

Built upon decades of dedicated research and an informed analysis of recent developments in scholarly thought, Adelina Modesti’s contribution to the Illuminating Women Artists series is essential reading for any student or enthusiast seeking an overview of the remarkable life and work of Elisabetta Sirani (1638–1665). By seamlessly weaving into the text faithful English translations of seventeenth-century Italian sources and non-judgemental explanations of art historical terminology, Modesti has forged a highly accessible narrative which is gripping, informative, and truly illuminating.

Modesti begins by providing an impressively concise overview of the contemporary issues which shaped Sirani as an artist, including those relating to her family, education, and influential sociopolitical debates associated with the Counter-Reformation. Alongside addressing topics familiar to the scholar of early modern women, such as the Querelle des Femmes (‘Woman Question’), it also considers those factors unique to Bologna which allowed women artists to flourish. The most significant of these is the “matrilineal pedagogic model”, a term coined by Modesti to acknowledge Bologna’s encouragement of women teaching other women (p.19). Readers who wish to delve further into recent archival discoveries relating to the success of Bolognese women artists are appropriately signposted to Babette Bohn’s Women Artists, their Patrons, and their Publics in Early Modern Bologna (Penn State University Press, 2021).

Chapter 2 evaluates Sirani’s training, artistic influences, technique, and style. In accordance with Linda Nochlin’s 1971 argument – that the disadvantages faced by women artists should not be employed as an intellectual position – Modesti emphasises the wealth of resources available to Sirani: plaster casts, sculptures, paintings, drawings, palace collections, churches, books, and religious festivities to name a few. Relevant archival materials support investigations into Sirani’s colleagues and apprentices, particularly Lorenzo Tinti (1626–1672), whose artistic relationship with the maestra has not yet received its due focus and would be worth further investigation. A short paragraph on Sirani’s little-known caricatures (p.50) presents a similarly tantalising opportunity for further research.

However, it is Modesti’s ability to paint a picture of Sirani’s genuine passion for her profession which remains the most illuminating aspect of this chapter, and indeed of the whole monograph. Of note are personal anecdotes from Sirani’s biographer and friend, Carlo Cesare Malvasia (1616–1693); one of these (p.41) recalls the artist’s repeated visits to a jewellery shop to view a much-loved painting, and her subsequent avoidance of returning out of embarrassment for spending so much time admiring it. Descriptions of Sirani’s technique are just as evocative, for instance, how her experiments with wet-on-wet paint application created a “shimmering quality to the surface of her paintings” (p.32).  Modesti’s writing brings Sirani to life in this chapter, allowing her youth, character, and talent to radiate from the glossy printed reproductions of her works. It is a must-read example of how to introduce a non-specialist audience to the world of art history.

A natural progression from the previous chapter, Chapter 3 covers the themes, subjects, and iconography of Sirani’s works. An examination of Sirani’s religious paintings considers their propensity for use in spiritual reflection, a significant role for artworks in the Counter-Reformation. The suggestion that Sirani’s depictions of Saint Anne gained popularity as exemplars of the aforementioned matrilineal pedagogic model is insightful and well-supported. Perhaps the most successful use of images appears in this section (pp.64–65). The rich red, white, and blue drapery of Sirani’s Virgin and Child (1663) is complemented by that of the adjacent Salvator Mundi (c.1655–8), while a self-portrait sketch apparently used as the basis of the latter work is displayed alongside it, allowing direct comparison.

However, Modesti’s examination of Sirani’s historical heroines is tenuous in places. Her argument that the formal composition of Timoclea may have been inspired by Artemisia Gentileschi’s Judith Beheading Holofernes (c.1620) (p.78) is a refreshing addition to the discourse; yet one cannot help feeling that this was an attempt to shoehorn in a connection between two women artists where there is no extant evidence that they had any knowledge of each other’s works. More perplexing is the lack of any reference to Amy Golhany’s 2011 article – which recognises the irrefutable similarity between Sirani’s Timoclea and an earlier eponymous print by Matthaüs Merian (1593–1650) – despite its inclusion in Modesti’s select bibliography.

It is also worth noting that the section on anti-heroines assumes the authenticity of an Iole (1662), a Cleopatra (c.1664), and a Circe (c.1664), all of which have contested authorship. Modesti is known for taking an enthusiastic approach to attributions, sparking much debate with the other primary scholar on Sirani, Babette Bohn. The reader should remain conscious of this and take a critical approach to new attributions in this work. Chapter 1, for instance, attributes a painting traditionally thought to be by Sirani to her sister Barbara. The curious reader will discover that the ‘reference’ supporting this claim is a link to a Facebook image of the work with no caption, posted to the page of the Galleria Umbria Perugia in 2022. There are, I am sure, reasons behind this assertion, but without knowing them it is difficult to judge its validity.

Chapter 4 offers an extensive evidence-based analysis of the artist’s patronage networks and modes of self-representation. Of note are some previously unrecognised connections with the Medici, including commissions from a Medici courtier, the chief administrative officer of the Medici military company, and a Bolognese statesman in the service of a Medici cardinal (p.99). Modesti’s chronological analysis of Sirani’s notebook is a particularly helpful guide to the evolution of the artist’s popularity over time. Towards the end of this chapter, the inclusion of visual reproductions of contemporary laude (figs. 69 and 70, p.110) adds valuable weight to the running emphasis on the artist’s impressive reputation.

Modesti’s concluding chapter is fittingly dedicated to documenting the posthumous memory of Sirani. This section provides a stark reminder of the tragedy of Sirani’s untimely death, supported by detailed descriptions of her funeral proceedings and three moving contemporary letters mourning her loss. A brief but comprehensive analysis of Sirani’s critical reception through time follows. This section subtly emphasises the important role played by women in preserving Sirani’s memory across the centuries, from Carolina Bonafede’s 1856 biographic play to the use of the Timoclea in the #MeToo movement. The commemorative plaque now adorning Sirani’s home could potentially have provided further support for Modesti’s comments on the early twentieth-century dismissal of Sirani’s works as imitations of her predecessor, Guido Reni (1575–1642). However, this omission does not detract from the success of this chapter.

Just as Sirani produced an astonishing 200+ paintings in just over a decade of work, Modesti’s book encompasses a vast amount of research in just 144 pages. This need for concision results in a few minor lapses in academic rigour, mostly in the justifications for attributions. Nonetheless, this book provides a much-needed point of entry into the world of Elisabetta Sirani, reminding us that many historical women artists are still awaiting equal representation outside of the boundaries of academia.

Anna Pratley recently graduated from the Warburg Institute with an MA (Dist.) in Art History, Curatorship and Renaissance Culture. Her research interests include amateur women miniaturists working in seventeenth-century England, the domestic lives of the “middle class” in the long eighteenth century, and the application of feminist surveillance theory to women’s self-portraiture.

Review: WSG Seminar (25 September 2021) by Miriam Al Jamil

This is a review of the WSG seminar that took place on 25 September 2021. The speakers were:

  1. Valerie Schutte: Anachronistic representations of Edward Underhill
  2. Helen Leighton Rose: Women’s subversion of the Scottish Church Courts 1707-1757
  3. Matthew Reznicek: Healing the Nation; Women, Medicine and the Romantic National Tale
  4. Norena Shopland: Women Dressed as Men

Abstracts of the speakers’ papers are available to read here.

Our 2021-2022 Seminar season began with an excellent selection of papers from four speakers, ostensibly on a variety of unrelated topics and yet subtle connections emerged through the discussion.

Valerie Schutte’s paper examined the afterlives of Gentleman Pensioner Edward Underhill’s 1561 memoir which traced his life as a Protestant under Mary I’s reign, beginning with his arrest for publishing a now lost ballad at her accession in 1553. Elements of the memoir later appeared in John Strype’s 1721 Ecclesiastical Memorials which was used by Agnes and Elizabeth Strickland in their Lives of the Queens of England, From the Norman Conquest, With Anecdotes of Their Courts (London: Henry Colburn, 1845) and by the prolific writer W.H. Ainsworth in his popular The Tower of London (London: Bentley, 1840). Schutte offered Underhill’s devotion to the queen in spite of his anti-Catholicism as a more nuanced alternative to the standard view of hostile Protestant reaction to Mary. The nineteenth-century writers she examined were sympathetic to Mary, citing her marriage to Philip II of Spain as the source of Protestant oppression throughout her reign, although Charles Dickens’ unequivocal characterisation of ‘bloody Queen Mary’ still prevails as part of the national historical narrative.

In the discussion Schutte expanded on archival evidence of ballads against Mary I, citing twenty surviving examples, handwritten on cheap paper, most in single copies at the Society of Antiquaries. The writers were persecuted, though some of their ballads no longer exist. Underhill’s Catholic friends gave him the nickname ‘the Hot Gospeller’, a term picked up on by Ainsworth. Schutte also noted that the Strickland sisters’ romantic study of the Queens of England focused on them as women rather than simply as wives, which makes the book unusual.

Helen Leighton Rose’s paper presented her ongoing work on cases brought before the Scottish Kirk in two localities. She discussed the different recorded cases brought before the sessions, the types of moral offences and forms of punishment. The crimes included adultery, for which the punishment was six appearances wearing sackcloth in a public place of repentance, and fornication which involved three appearances. The ultimate sanction, meted out to a woman who repeatedly refused to appear was ‘lesser excommunication’, which meant she was shunned by her community, denied marriage, baptism or a funeral and banished from her place of birth. Rose pointed out that this had serious implications for accessing poor relief. The case studies revealed intriguing facts about women who were unafraid of accusing and naming the men implicated in their crimes, and who defied the punishments meted out to them. They also highlighted the fact that wealthy men could often avoid embarrassing personal repercussions by helping their pregnant victims circumvent the kirk disciplinary system and give birth in arranged lodgings in Edinburgh, while they themselves could evade punishment by paying fines. The case studies brought the individual women uncovered from the archives vividly to life.

Discussion points included the role of the well organised private lodging houses in Edinburgh, which require more research. A question was asked about cross-dressing as a recorded crime, and Rose has not found this or homosexuality mentioned in the records yet. The rich subject of her research clearly offers many different rewarding paths for future work.

Our third paper centred on Sydney Owenson’s The Wild Irish Girl (1806) Vol. I, II and Vol. III,   

and Maria Edgeworth’s Ennui, or Memoirs of the Earl of Glenthorn (1809).

The paper interrogated the idea of healing as a potentially feminist intervention. Reznicek gave a close reading of these novels, in the light of the social and economic conditions of Ireland which contributed to high mortality in nineteenth-century cholera outbreaks, and the concept of a healthy social body composed of healthy individuals to which the woman as healer made a crucial contribution. Owenson’s novel is usually cited as the first ‘national tale’, but is not usually interpreted as a story of sickness and healing (See for example, discussions in:

https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/cambridge-companion-to-the-irish-novel/national-tale-and-allied-genres-1770s1840s/7195FADCF1F85A2DB7E05A43EE49A15E [accessed 28 September 2021]).

Reznicek suggested that Owenson’s use of the word ‘physicianer’ to describe her character Glorvina was a deliberate subversive one to challenge contemporary male-dominated medical practice. The plot of the novel reveals that the threat of disease and religious fervour in the Prince of Inismore character makes his integration into the new social body impossible. Edgeworth used fever as a potent metaphor with multiple meanings. Her novel Ennui poses literature as the remedy of ennui as a disease. Once again, the woman is healer within the plot and in the broader context of the national social body.

Discussion ranged from the disabled body in Romantic fiction such as the Waverley novels, to Swift’s The Story of the Injured Lady in which ‘Ireland’ is the wronged virgin and ‘Scotland’ is the sickly rival for marriage to ‘England’, in Swift’s critique of marriage.

Our final paper was an overview of Norena Shopland’s writing projects, specialising in LGBT history, highlighting pertinent issues for many researchers into womens’ history. The instability of terminology and changes of definitions over time means that it can be difficult to find people from the past, particularly in the case of women living their lives as men, dressing, and working as men, unrecorded and marginalised. Shopland mentioned such celebrated cases as Hannah Snell, the soldier; Mary Anne Talbot or John Taylor, a sailor; and the pirates Anne Bonny and Mary Read. Other unidentified women later worked as navvies on the railways or as bricklayers, etc. The pay was better for men’s work, and it could be a short-term solution to hardship.

During a lively question session, the point was made that the literary cross-dressing heroine usually returns to heteronormativity after her escape to follow her lover is resolved in the plot. The detective work necessary to uncover archival sources for the anonymous women and the confusion over national traditions of dress which might be interpreted as more male than female; the infantilisation of women as a subtext in the ‘breeching’ of boys who progressed to adulthood and left their sisters behind; breeches parts for women in the theatre; and the hazards of labouring as a man with the vulnerabilities of the female body were all topics addressed. The interesting textual alteration made to the 16th century Geneva Bible which described Adam and Eve using fig leaves to make themselves breeches showed the sensitivity to gender-appropriate terms, when it was illegal for a woman to take men’s clothing.

As usual, the discussion could have continued well beyond time. We found all the papers stimulating and thought provoking. Our thanks to all the participants, and we look forward to more insights into WSG speakers’ research in the months to come.

-Miriam Al Jamil

Early Modern Women: Lives, Texts, Objects. Edited by Martine van Elk. https://martinevanelk.wordpress.com/ Accessed 11 February 2020.

Martine van Elk’s Early Modern Women: Lives, Texts, Objects is a fascinating blog that offers interdisciplinary and comparative analysis of early modern women authors and artists. The blog emphasizes that authorship, writing, and artistic endeavors were often interlinked as different aspects of self-expression. It has a search function, as well as an archive drop down by month and a category filter with options such as courtesans, biography, marriage, and religious women. Van Elk also accepts guest posts, which seem to represent more than half of the entries.

Its greatest strength is that Van Elk highlights the lives and works of a transnational group of women, typically English and Dutch, which reflects her 2017 monograph on early modern women writers in England and the Dutch Republic. She argues that seventeenth-century women need to be examined from a cross-cultural perspective to more fully understand the collective experience of early modern women as a whole.

The blog is suitable for both a general and a scholarly audience, as she highlights little know women and topics that could be introductory to students and those interested in the early modern period, yet every entry contains a section with references for further reading and most entries engage with the historiography of the subject. The entries are typically about 2,000 words and take many different foci, from one single object, such as the handkerchief (18 September 2016), to a theme, such as mottos (18 October 2016) or engraving (22 February 2017), to case studies of a specific woman or group of women, such as Celia Fiennes (18 June 2018) and Susanna Teellinck (10 July 2019).

My favorite entry is on female engravers, one written by Van Elk herself. In this post, Van Elk explores to what extent copper engraving was a gendered activity, in that it would have taken place in a male-dominated print shop. She finds print-making to be a collaborative activity between a designer, engraver, and publisher. Seventeenth-century female engravers were rare, but when known, it seems like they also had male relatives who were engravers and they worked within a family business. Magdalena van de Passe (1600–1638) was daughter and sister to male Dutch engravers, and created prints by the time she was 14 years old. Her engravings often were derivative of other engravers, which Van Elk suggests could be understood as translations, in the way that translation of texts was a more suitable activity for women than was original writing.
Sadly, the most recent blog entry is from July 2019, and it was written by a guest. As many of Van Elk’s own posts stemmed from research for her 2017 book, hopefully new posts will arrive as she works on her own new research. She is also a main contributor to the Early Modern Female Book Ownership blog (previously reviewed here), where her newest entries can be found.

Valerie Schutte
Independent Scholar

Valerie Schutte has published widely on royal Tudor women, book dedications, and queenship. Her second monograph, Princesses Mary and Elizabeth Tudor and the Royal Gift Book Exchange, will be published with ARC Humanities Press in 2021.

Review of WSG Seminar: 20th February 2020

Despite the recent cold weather, the atmosphere at the Women’s Studies Group February seminar was as warm and welcoming as ever. We were treated to three very different, but equally fascinating papers, the individual chronologies of which stretched from the mid-seventeenth century to the 1820s and covered subjects as diverse as death and dying, legal and textual subjectivities and observations of nineteenth-century Chilean culture. At the heart of each, though, lay careful analyses of how women in the past constructed themselves and the world around them through the written word. The seminar was conducted via zoom and ably chaired by Trudie Messent.

First to speak was Dr Sarah Ailwood of the University of Wollongong. Sarah lectures in law and has previously authored a book on Jane Austen and masculinities. Her talk for the WSG, however, was entitled ‘In justice to myself’: Legal and Textual Subjectivities in Eighteenth-Century Women’s Memoirs’. Sarah’s central thesis was that by ‘harnessing emerging genres of popular, published life writing’, namely the print memoir, ‘women forged a new form of legal subjectivity.’ She began by outlining the theory developed by Costas Douzinas that those living within a modern liberal democracy will be typically both subjectus and subjectum in relation to the law: that is, simultaneously under the authority of the law and a participant in its creation. In contrast to this, women of the eighteenth century were only subjectus, bound to obey the law without participating in its creation. Sarah also cited the work of Peter Goodrich – that the power of the law rests in its cultural influence, as well as institutions and legal texts. From this theoretical starting point, Sarah explored the idea that the female-authored mid-eighteenth-century legal memoir allowed women to ‘create a new, resistant form of legal subjectivity’ and evidenced this through the work of two eighteenth-century women: Sarah Rippon and Anne Bailey. Rippon published The True State of the Case of Sarah Rippon in 1756 and used the subjectus persona of a poor, vulnerable widow to challenge both the legal system and the men who conspired against her, showcasing her knowledge of the system and her abilities as a litigant as she did so. Bailey constructed a similar subjectus persona through her 1771 text The Memoirs of Mrs Anne Bailey. In this she positioned herself as a victim caught in a cycle of debt, assault and exploitation even though the true purpose of the book was to publicly shame the men who had wronged her. Sarah argued that although both women ostensibly cast themselves as oppressed victims of the legal system, their memoirs speak to their authors’ resistance of that role and their determination to assert agency over the narrative of their life.

The second speaker was Daisy Winter, a PhD student at Northumbria University. She examined the writings of Lady Elizabeth Delaval within the context of seventeenth-century women’s devotional meditations. This was a time when women were expected to examine and reflect upon their behaviours, not least to use written texts to curate a ‘good death’ for themselves when the time came. However, Daisy argued that the motivations for Delaval’s musings were complex and may not have stemmed solely from a fear of judgement in death. Two meditations were considered in detail. The first, written in 1662, was entitled ‘Upon the Singing of a Lark’. In this, Delaval used the ‘Godly’ bird to rebuke her habit of sleeping in late. The second was a cluster of prayers written as a response to a severe bout of toothache. This was allegedly caused by an infestation of more than two hundred worms(!) and inspired Delaval to contemplate her own mortality. Intriguingly, this gory episode may not have had its roots in personal experience. Daisy cited the work of Sara Read, who suggests that Delaval may have appropriated it from a letter originating at the court of Charles 1. As Delaval’s family were Stuart sympathisers, the tale could also function as an indication of political allegiance. Further, Daisy argued that Delaval’s writings also link to wider cultural concerns surrounding disease, death and decay: this was a time when the plague swept across England and Delaval, like so many of her contemporaries, was personally affected by it. Indeed, toothache was also not the inconvenience it is today but a potentially deadly illness, with tooth problems regularly appearing as a cause of death in contemporary bills of mortality. Daisy also explored the temporal disruption between the composition of the texts and their later transcription by an older Delaval into the curated manuscript that exists today, possibly as a precursor for publication. Daisy concluded by saying that although Delaval’s approach to crafting a good death was complicated, it was likely she did experience a fear of her own mortality, when ‘her neglect of her “penitential hours” [came] to haunt her.’

The final paper was given by Valentina Aparicio, from the University of Edinburgh. Her paper was entitled ‘Maria Graham’s Journal of a residence in Chile (1824): a transnational community of women’ and forms part of a wider research project concerning Scottish women who travelled to South America at the end of the eighteenth and start of the nineteenth centuries. Her paper for the WSG focussed on Maria Graham, who was born Maria Dundas and later became known as Lady Callcott. Graham travelled to Chile with her husband. However, he died before they arrived and she landed in South America as a widow. Rather than return home, she elected to stay in the town of Valparaiso and, during the year she spent there, Graham mixed with people from a number of different backgrounds, nationalities and classes. Generally, Graham appeared to be more sympathetic towards Chilean women, rather than the expatriate British women she met, whom she likened to Mrs Elton from Austen’s Emma. Valentina examined two of Graham’s encounters in detail. The first featured an elderly neighbour with a large flower garden who used her horticultural knowledge for healing purposes – La Chabelita. The second was with the women of La Rinconada who made the pottery Graham used at home. One of the most striking observations Valentina made was that Graham did not appear to apply her own British, classist, world-view to the Chilean women she encountered. Rather, she was prepared to meet with them in their own contexts and engage with them upon their own terms. For example, when she visited the female potters she was eager to sit down with them and join them in their work. As was later discussed during the questions, this may well have reflected a (post)Romantic ideal of the labouring poor but equally may have been something she would not have felt able to do in her own country where strict notions of class propriety would apply.

It was a stimulating and enjoyable session that provided much food for thought and a number of lively discussions during the questions. Huge thanks to all our speakers and to everyone who made February’s session possible.

Review by Dr Alison Daniell