Early Modern Women in the Low Countries: Feminizing Sources and Interpretations of the Past (Women and Gender in the Early Modern World)

Description

Combining historical, historiographical, museological, and touristic analysis, this study investigates how late medieval and early modern women of the Low Countries expressed themselves through texts, art, architecture and material objects, how they were represented by contemporaries, and how they have been interpreted in modern academic and popular contexts. Broomhall and Spinks analyse late medieval and early modern women's opportunities to narrate their experiences and ideas, as well as the processes that have shaped their representation in the heritage and cultural tourism of the Netherlands and Belgium today. The authors study female-authored objects such as familial and political letters, dolls' houses, account books; visual sources, funeral monuments, and buildings commissioned by female patrons; and further artworks as well as heritage sites, streetscapes, souvenirs and clothing with gendered historical resonances. Employing an innovative range of materials from written sources to artworks, material objects, heritage sites and urban precincts, the authors argue that interpretations of late medieval and early modern women's experiences by historians and art scholars interact with presentations by cultural and heritage tourism providers in significant ways that deserve closer interrogation by feminist researchers. Cover Contents List of Illustrations List of Tables Acknowledgements Introduction 1 Writing Elite Women into the Burgundian and Habsburg Netherlands 2 Visualizing Women’s Work in the Textile Trades at the Dawn of the Golden Age 3 Memorializing Grief in Familial and National Narratives of Dutch Identity 4 Imagining Domesticity in Early Modern Dutch Dolls’ Houses 5 The Rembrandt House and the Rubens House: Encountering Early Modern Women through Heritage Sites 6 Sources and Settings: The Uses of Place for Tourism, Heritage, and History 7 Purchasing the Past: Gender and the Consumption of Heritage Conclusion: From Yesterday to Tomorrow: Seeing and Hearing Women in the Low Countries Works Cited Index