Womenswriting · Women’s Plague Writing in Early Modern England
Horizon 2020 — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions
- Duration
- 2017-09-01 → 2022-09-14
- EU contribution
- €255,350
- Participants
- 2
- Scheme
- MSCA-IF
Lines connect the coordinator with its partners.
Results in brief
Women’s Plague Writing in Early Modern England
While early modern plague epidemics have been thoroughly addressed within the disciplines of literature, literary history, history and material culture over the past decade, much of this scholarship has focused on male-authored texts that emerged from England’s “great” plague outbreaks. As a result, women’s participation in the textual landscape of early modern England’s plague outbreaks has remained relatively unstudied. This project examines the myriad ways in which women wrote about plague, as well as the ways in which early modern constructions of pestilence were gendered. The project has encompassed a range of outreach activities, participation in scholarly events, and writing projects, which, taken together, have resulted in a full-period view of how women were essential actors during early modern plague outbreaks. Through a range of activities, including skills training and teaching, focused on gaining expertise in early modern paleography, I have significantly enhanced my ability to work with manuscripts. Early modern women frequently recorded their interactions with plague in manuscript, documenting recipes against infection in manuscript receipt books or writing about the disease in relation to day-to-day events in life writing, such as diaries or spiritual journals. My project also features a significant trans-Atlantic dimension, and I have spearheaded an edited volume entitled Medicine and Religion in the Trans-Atlantic World, 1600-1815, which has been submitted to Penn State University Press. The volume features eminent scholars in the fields of trans-Atlantic studies, early modern history and literature, and plague writing. The volume includes valuable contributions that situate early modern plague outbreaks within the Atlantic world.
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
In a time when high-profile outbreaks such as zika and ebola frequently make news headlines, the proposed research project, ‘Women’s Plague Writing in Early Modern England’, provides an opportunity to interrogate how we interpret medical writing, who talks about medical problems and how gender becomes entangled in outbreaks by looking to the past. ‘Women’s Plague Writing in Early Modern England’ will undertake a survey and analysis of women’s plague writing in England from 1550 to 1700. A three-year Global Fellowship project with a two-year outgoing phase at the University of Toronto (UofT) and incoming phase at Queen’s University Belfast (QUB), the research action takes an interdisciplinary approach to women’s plague writing across the early modern period in England. The research programme explores the medical humanities through the lens of literature in its historical context. This project will change the canon of plague writing, which has hitherto focused on male-authored texts. Moving from the single outbreak focus seen in my first monograph, The Literary Culture of Plague in Early Modern England (forthcoming with Palgrave Macmillan), the outcome of the project makes the significant leap to studying a period of plague writing, a bigger-scale picture, with a broad chronology that captures major plague outbreaks in 1592, 1603, 1625, 1630, 1636 and 1665. The project encapsulates a full-period picture of women’s interactions with plague and medicine and the corresponding gendering of plague writing. It will examine how women discuss the disease and how this differs from male-authored texts. It will ask how the medium chosen for publishing a text, print or manuscript, impacted how women discussed the disease. It will investigate how women’s understanding of plague was gendered and, more broadly, how the textual construction of pestilence was gendered in early modern England.
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
- THE QUEEN'S UNIVERSITY OF BELFAST · BELFASTCoordinatorUnited Kingdom
- THE GOVERNING COUNCIL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO · TorontoCanada
Links
Data: CORDIS, © European Union