The Case for a Feminist Return to Form

Dodds, Lara; Dowd, Michelle M.

doi:10.1353/emw.2018.0052

Cited by 4 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…A recent forum in the journal Early Modern Women covered the topic "Rethinking Methodologies for Early Modern Women's Studies." Articles include a discussion of using formalism as a feminist methodology, of how the Early Modern Recipes Online Collective (EMROC) uses a collaborative methodology to provide open access copies of manuscript recipe books, and of the usefulness of network analysis for uncovering women's communities and contacts (Dodds and Dowd 2018;Laroche et al 2018;Medici 2018). In another recent essay collection, Megan Matchinske posits that many gender scholars use elements of new formalism (in which they pay attention to the "aesthetic power and the myriad social, representational, and historical effects" of a text) and of a historicism that thinks about "all types of writing, no matter their form, within a shared network of institutions, practices, and politics" (Matchinske 2018, 94).…”

Section: Methods In Early Modern Women's Writingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Methodologies: Working with Early Modern Women’s Manuscripts

Burke

2021

The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Early Modern Women's Writing

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The methodologies students and scholars can use when working with early modern women's manuscripts are multiple. Insights can be gained from applying the techniques of book history and manuscript studies, such as the study of handwriting, layout, binding, and the structure of documents. Though hands-on analysis of manuscripts is ideal, many manuscripts are now available in digitized formats, and this entry outlines advantages and disadvantages to their use. In addition to using methods from early modern manuscript studies, scholars can also choose to use some from the field of women's writing, such as asking questions about identity and agency, bringing intersectional categories to bear (such as race, class, region, and religion), and asking what a focus on gender can reveal about choices of genre, audiences, and networks. Researchers need to be aware of the challenges that can arise when working with manuscripts, from problems in attributing manuscripts to women, to accounting for lost texts, to deciding whether to pursue research via case studies or by using larger aggregate data, to being wary of existing editions. Finally, as with any kind of scholarship, scholars need to be sensitive to their own desire to impose categories and preconceptions on writing from a period that is very different from their own.

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Section: Methods In Early Modern Women's Writingmentioning

confidence: 99%