Review of Sigrund Haude and Melinda S. Zook, eds, Challenging Orthodoxies: The Social and Cultural Worlds of Early Modern Women: Essays Presented to Hilda L. Smith

ABO : Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts 1640-1830, Dec 2016

This article reviews Sigrun Haude and Melinda S. Zook, eds, Challenging Orthodoxies: The Social and Cultural Worlds of Early Modern Women: Essays Presented to Hilda L. Smith.

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Review of Sigrund Haude and Melinda S. Zook, eds, Challenging Orthodoxies: The Social and Cultural Worlds of Early Modern Women: Essays Presented to Hilda L. Smith

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts Review of Sigrund Haude and Melinda S. Zook , eds, Challenging Orthodoxies: Th e Social and Cultural Worlds of Early Modern Women: Essays Presented to Hilda L. Smith Emma Major 0 1 2 3 Isles Commons 0 1 2 3 0 Commons , Feminist, Gender , and Sexuality Studies Commons, and the Literature in English , British 1 Part of the Dramatic Literature , Criticism and The ory Commons, Educational Methods 2 University of York , UK 3 Author Biography Emma Major is a Senior Lecturer at the Centre for Eighteenth-Century Studies, University of York Follow this and additional works at: http://scholarcommons.usf.edu/abo Recommended Citation - Creative Commons License Thi s work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 License. Thi s reviews is available in ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830: http://scholarcommons.usf.edu/abo/vol6/ iss2/5 Major: Challenging Orthodoxies Sigrun Haude and Melinda S. Zook , eds, Challenging Orthodoxies: The Social and Cultural Worlds of Early Modern Women: Essays Presented to Hilda L. Smith. Farnham: Ashgate, 2014. Xi + 265pp. ISBN: 978-1409457084. Reviewed by Emma Major Centre for Eighteenth-Century Studies and Department of English, University of York Furry Girls. Gun-slinging women, and female gunmakers. Lice narratives. Juries of matrons. This excellent collection of essays in honour of Hilda L. Smith is full of surprises and scholarly delights. Smith’s pioneering, intellectually rigorous, and illuminating work has, as the title of the volume indicates, consistently challenged orthodoxies and asked readers to think about the historically denied and still often ignored phenomenon of the “woman who thinks.” The publishing arc evident in the progress from the defiantly titled Reason’s Disciples: SeventeenthCentury English Feminists (1982) to her co-edited Pickering and Chatto multi-volume Women’s Political Writings, 1610-1725 (2007) is suggestive of her contribution to the changing content of history books and historical studies, though less immediately evident from this overview is her refusal to settle for any form of intellectual laziness in creating easy stories about the past. “My work has often been as strongly at odds with the direction of women’s history, and later gender studies, as with traditional historical scholarship,” she wrote in 1999; excited by her encounters with past voices, she was dismayed “by the degree to which interceding years of historical scholarship have worked as much to obscure the realities of these subjects as to illuminate them” (211). She has been influential in many ways, as this collection shows, but most significantly in refusing to accept the casual intellectual segregation assumed by a patriarchal academy that is still often in sloppy but self-perpetuating force today. Her work summons up a community of female voices, dead and alive, that dare to think, to disagree, and to act against the norm. This important and invigorating festschrift is a model of how such tributes should work: while celebrating the subject, the energy and interest of the essays are also testament to the lasting urgency and fascination of the areas of scholarship Smith continues to open up and illuminate through her calls to listen to the past rather than to impose our narratives upon it. Berenice A. Carroll’s moving concluding chapter quotes Hannah Arendt on the “authentic diversity” of the politically disempowered; such diversity, such seizing of power in unexpected ways at specific historical moments, is reflected in the range of topics in this collection (216). Here we are introduced to women who lend money, work as female lawyers, sit on juries, make guns and use them, and take their employers to court. Margaret Cavendish, the Duchess of Newcastle, is (fittingly) a recurring figure through the collection, appearing by turn in her various guises as author, scientist, eccentric, and rebel, but the essays are more united in spirit than they are in subject—indeed, as my opening words suggest, they are gloriously diverse, sharing a respect for Smith, an eye for those relegated to the sidelines by history and historians, and, often, an infectious rage at the injustices of history. The collection is divided into three parts, of which the first and the third are perhaps the most exciting, though all the essays are informative and engaging. The first section, “Challenging Cultural and Social Traditions,” includes three very different but superb essays: Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks’ fascinating piece on the boundaries of womanhood as tested by the case of the furry Gonzales sisters; Lois G. Schwoerer’s gripping account of women and guns in early modern London; and Barbara J. Todd’s revelatory essay on female investors in public finance. Part II, “Challenging Scientific and Intellectual Traditions,” holds fewer surprises overall, but Lisa T. Sarasohn brings a fresh perspective to microscop (...truncated)


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Emma Major. Review of Sigrund Haude and Melinda S. Zook, eds, Challenging Orthodoxies: The Social and Cultural Worlds of Early Modern Women: Essays Presented to Hilda L. Smith, ABO : Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts 1640-1830, 2016, Volume 6, Issue 2,