REVERE · Revisiting the Seventeenth-Century Republic of Letters

Revisiting the Seventeenth-Century Republic of Letters

The project examines the writer’s career in Spanish and English within the seventeenth-century Republic of Letters (as contemporaries across borders called the literary field), with a focus on women publishing as “professional” authors and as scholars, since the view of the marginality of the woman author in the early modern literary field continues to be pervasive. Extending the investigation of the writer’s career across genders and geo-linguistic boundaries was imperative to have an informed picture of the extent and implications of the mobility of print culture in this period: transnational studies exploring the cross-cultural mobility of public texts, particularly those including female authorship, are still a small minority, while their ambitions never concretely investigate how authorial and editorial practices interact with each other; most specialists continue to structure their discussions according to gender, theme, period, geography, or language, thereby obscuring broader diachronic trends towards women’s increasing participation in the professional world of authorship. In so doing, the project makes an original contribution to gender studies and book history by elucidating the consolidation of women’s position as authors through print within the transnational study of authorial and editorial practices in seventeenth-century Europe. Additionally, the project introduces the work of seventeenth-century women authors and its cross-cultural dimension to a general audience, to underline the importance of past authoritative models of female agency and their connection to present ones in raising awareness of women’s place in cultural history —namely, via podcasts, exhibitions, and public talks with round table discussions—, which can be integrated in university or school curricula. The diversity offered by the textual corpus doubtless helps the audience’s direct engagement with the research, while similarities in the books’ material and discursive properties helps raise a collective awareness of a shared European heritage of popular culture, which appeals to the general audience’s sense of communitarian belonging. In short, the project brings new understanding of the process of commercialization as the book trade developed in the seventeenth century and evaluates the effects of the mobility of print from one culture to another by exploring how authorial and editorial practices in literary production interlink and flow.

Data: CORDIS, © European Union