Shakespeare's Sisters: Voices of English and European Women Writers, 1500-1700: Difference between revisions

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This revelatory exhibition brings together the works of more than 50 sixteenth- and seventeenth-century women writers from England and continental Europe, writing in formats that range from poems, prose fiction, and memoirs to translations, plays, and more. In all, scholars in recent decades have identified and studied hundreds of women writers from the early modern age.
''Shakespeare’s Sisters: Voices of English and European Women Writers, 1500-1700'' takes its title from a famous passage in Virginia Woolf’s book ''A Room of One’s Own'' (1929), in which Woolf imagines a gifted sister of William Shakespeare, completely thwarted by the social restrictions of his day. Drawing on the breadth and depth of the Folger collection, with additional rare materials from other institutions, ''Shakespeare’s Sisters'' presents a far more complex—and fascinating—reality.


== Curator ==
Curated by Georgianna Ziegler, the exhibition opened on February 3, 2012, and closed on May 20, 2012. The exhibition was free and open to the public from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., Monday through Saturday, and from noon to 5 p.m. on Sunday. Group tours were available.


== Curator Insights ==  
== About the curator ==


== Online Exhibitions ==
Georgianna Ziegler is Louis B. Thalheimer Head of Reference at the Folger Shakespeare Library.
After receiving a doctorate at the University of Pennsylvania in early modern English and French literature, Georgianna taught at Davidson College and Wofford College in the Carolinas. She then returned to the University of Pennsylvania where she served as Curator of the Horace Howard Furness Shakespeare Library in the Rare Book Department, while also teaching classes in English literature and pursuing a library degree at Drexel University.
In 1992, Georgianna came to the Folger where, in addition to her reference and teaching work, she has curated several exhibitions, notably ''Shakespeare’s Unruly Women'', and ''Elizabeth I: Then and Now'', as well as co-curating exhibitions on mapping, on Shakespeare in children’s literature, and on the Boydell Shakespeare Gallery.
Georgianna is an active member of the Shakespeare Association of America and the Renaissance Society of America, and has published on Shakespeare’s heroines, on Elizabeth I and Elizabeth of Bohemia, and on the calligrapher Esther Inglis. She has recently finished a book manuscript, ''Domesticating the Bard: Women and Shakespeare 1790-1890''.
 
== Curator's insights ==
 
"I've been interested for years in early women writers," says Ziegler. "It's been something new and exciting in early modern studies over the past 30 to 40 years, a whole new area to find and develop. In the past, women hadn't received much attention from scholars of the early modern era, but then in the 1980s and 1990s, there was a lot of archival work to find writing by early modern women writers. Now we're into a new generation, where young scholars write secondary works about what has been found. But the digging goes on, too. And scholars come to the Folger to do this research."
"I hope visitors to the exhibition come away excited by the idea of all of these women writers at an early time," she says. "Most people aren't aware of how many there were and how varied their writings were"—and not just in England. "I wanted to include continental writers, too," she says, including Italian, French, and other women authors, playwrights, and poets, whose works are well represented in the Folger's large continental collection.
Among Ziegler's many favorites in the exhibition are the small, stunningly bound books of Psalms by calligrapher Esther Inglis. "I have always liked those calligraphic books," she says. "I've written about Inglis before, and I also wrote the entry about her in the ''Biographical Dictionary of Scottish Women''."
The Inglis books are typical of the exhibition in another way. "As I pulled the books for the exhibition, a pattern emerged: many were tiny or small. These are books of poems, Psalms, and plays, which you would expect to be in a small format. Even the Italian women's heroic romance tales are often small. The topics tend to be personal. The rare collection of Marguerites or poems by Queen Marguerite of Navarre, which we have on loan, is beautiful and it fits in your hand. As a queen, she could have afforded a larger book. That's also true of Queen Katherine Parr's book of prayers, which is in the exhibition, too. To me, the size suggests intimacy."
One of the exceptions to the rule is a large volume of plays by Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newscastle—a rare book that also produced a surprise. As the Cavendish book was being prepared for the exhibition, a previously hidden inscription was uncovered: "Mary [last name illegible], Her Booke Giuen by her Grace the Duches of Newcastle." As Ziegler explains, "We knew that Cavendish gave her books to friends with her corrections to the text in them." Before finding the inscription, however, "we never thought the notes in this copy were her own. Now we have to check to see if they were. We are trying to identify 'Mary,' too, although an ultraviolet (UV) photograph didn't make her last name readable." And so, in Ziegler's phrase, the "digging" into the rich subject of early modern women writers continues on.
 
== Multimedia experiences ==
 
Explore ''Shakespeare's Sisters'' [http://www.folger.edu/Content/Whats-On/Folger-Exhibitions/Past-Exhibitions/Shakespeares-Sisters/Online-Exhibition/ online], or on an [http://www.folger.edu/Content/Whats-On/Folger-Exhibitions/Past-Exhibitions/Shakespeares-Sisters/Audio-Tour.cfm/ audio tour].
 
An online exhibition for [http://www.folger.edu/Content/Teach-and-Learn/Shakespeare-for-Kids/Discover-Our-Collection/Shakespeares-Sisters/Shakespeares-Sisters.cfm/ children] offers an additional multimedia experience.


== The Mancini Sisters ==  
== The Mancini Sisters ==  


== Video: The Mancini Sisters ==
Elizabeth Goldsmith, author of ''The Kings' Mistresses: The Liberated Lives of Marie Mancini'', ''Princess Colonna'', and ''Her Sister Hortense'', ''Duchess Mazarin'' and a contributor to the Folger exhibition ''Shakespeare's Sisters: Voices of European Women, 1500-1700'', shares her thoughts on the remarkable lives of Marie and Hortense Mancini.
 
'''Marie and Hortense Mancini seem like such incredible women, very ahead of their time. Why don’t more people know about them today?'''
That’s an interesting question. In the United States, most people don’t know about them. Bits and pieces of their lives are very well known in France and in England. In Marie’s case, this is the story of her romance with Louis XIV. In French history, their teenage romance has become a legend confirming the process of growing up that Louis had to do, because he had to sacrifice her in order to make a royal marriage. But the rest of their lives are less known.
'''There were actually more Mancinis than just Marie and Hortense. What happened to the other girls?'''
There were three other sisters; each of them had interesting lives as well and was successfully married off. The oldest was Laure Mancini. She married a French nobleman but died young, in her 20s, in childbirth.
Olympia married Eugene Maurice, Count of Soissons, and took advantage of it right away. She was more of an intriguer. In the end, she was implicated in some scandalous criminal affairs at the French court and exiled for a period. She was not a timid soul by any means!
The youngest was Marie-Anne. She married a duke, Godefroy Maurice de La Tour d'Auvergne, and ran a sophisticated salon in Paris for writers and artists.
'''What do we know about the marriages of Marie and Hortense Mancini, and their experiences as royal mistresses?'''
After Marie’s experience as the mistress of Louis XIV she was exiled to a remote fortress on the Atlantic coast. She was released after she agreed to an arranged marriage to Lorenzo Colonna.
It seems the first years of the marriage weren’t that unhappy. She enjoyed a lot of prestige and he enjoyed having a highly-placed French wife. After they had three children, Lorenzo started having affairs, which enraged Marie. She decided she wanted what was known as “a separation of beds,” and he wasn’t willing to grant her that, and their relationship became very tense. She started fearing that he would plot to kill her and marry someone else. He was capable of it, he’d orchestrated the deaths of his enemies before.
Hortense had a clearly miserable marriage from the beginning. She was married to a religious fanatic who was also half-mad. She tried legal means to get a separation and wasn’t able to get it. So she decided she needed to just run away. She had had four children in four years and was 22 when she left.
Everyone took a look at Hortense’s husband and knew immediately why she left, but Marie’s husband was more subtle. His was a cat and mouse game.
 
'''What were the contemporary reactions to Marie and Hortense?'''
 
It’s hard to find much concrete evidence of expressions of envy or admiration,  although they did have some prominent advocates who fought on their behalf. There is a lot of press coverage that tends towards gossipy and scandalous. There is a lot of observation of their movements and speculation about where they would travel, and people following them with excitement.
There are also some more intellectual debates about the whole question of divorce, and under what circumstance does a woman have a right to split from her husband and retain her dowry. Then we have letters where people are writing about them; in one case, there are letters between a man and woman and the man is much more sympathetic to Hortense. So reactions don’t always divide along gender lines.
'''Did Marie and Hortense Mancini view themselves as revolutionary?'''
I don’t think they saw what they were doing as contributing to a political or ideological movement. But they were definitely iconoclastic and opposed a number of injustices that women of their time had to face. In their memoirs and in their lives, they are advocating for other women and for themselves.
 
For more information on the Mancini Sisters, visit [http://www.folger.edu/template.cfm?cid=4063&showpreview=1/ the online exhibition] or watch [http://www.folger.edu/Content/Whats-On/Folger-Exhibitions/Past-Exhibitions/Shakespeares-Sisters/Watch-The-Fabulous-Mancini-Sisters.cfm/ this video].
 
== Scholar's insights ==
 
''What would have happened had Shakespeare had a wonderfully gifted sister, called Judith, let us say ...''
''... it takes little skill in psychology to be sure that a highly gifted girl who had tried to use her gift for poetry would have been so thwarted and hindered ... that she would have lost her health and sanity.''
'''– Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own'''
Virginia Woolf' held a grim view of women's writing during the age of Shakespeare, in large part because she was entirely unaware of just how many women were writing. Woolf was aware of a few early women writers, but she had no idea how many women actually were writing, because many of their works circulated in manuscript and were never published. Among the women she read about were seventeenth-century diarist and historian Lady Anne Clifford, the women of the French Salons, and Mary Sidney and Mary Wroth. But others—women writing about love and heroic romances; women writing plays to be read and performed; women translating religious works—these she did not know of. As the exhibition explores the work of these women, from Mary Sidney and Laura Battiferri, and Louise Labé to Aphra Behn, it challenges Woolf ’s notion that women were unable to rise above their gender to create lasting works.
In recent decades, modern scholars have discovered or rediscovered many works that lay critically neglected for years. In the following [http://www.folger.edu/Content/Whats-On/Folger-Exhibitions/Past-Exhibitions/Shakespeares-Sisters/Scholars-Insights/ pages], these scholars give their insights into the rich literary lives of the women who truly were Shakespeare's sisters.
 
== Related publication ==
 
''Shakespeare's Sisters: Women Writers Bridge Five Centuries'' (2012), inspired by the exhibition, is a collection of new works by thirteen prominent women poets and authors—among them, former U.S. poets laureate Rita Dove and Maxine Kumin and Pulitzer Prize winning novelist Jane Smiley.  In this limited edition, handbound chapbook, each writer responds to works by sixteenth- and seventeenth-century women writers.


== Audio Tour ==
Among those voices:


== Just For Kids ==
*Jane Smiley, whose story "Marguerite, Queen of Navarre, Gives Desdemona Advice," reimagines ''Othello'' in letters between sixteenth-century writers Marguerite de Navarre and Vittoria Colonna and Shakespeare's Desdemona
*Rita Dove, on the future Elizabeth I, writing with a diamond on a window while confined at a lodge at the direction of her sister, Mary I
*Rosanna Warren, who urges the sixteenth-century poet Mary Sidney, creator of stunningly varied Psalm translations, to "translate us too"
*Maxine Kumin, in "Sonnets Uncorseted," on the prolific seventeenth-century poet and author Margaret Cavendish
*Elizabeth Nunez, on echoes of past literary salons in her grandmother's and other women's "Bloomsbury groups" in 1940s to 1960s Trinidad
*And still more from Elizabeth Alexander, Eavan Boland, Linda Gregerson, Jane Hirshfield, Marie Howe, Heather McHugh, Jacqueline Osherow, and Linda Pastan


== Scholar's Insights ==  
== Related programs ==


== Related Publication ==
This [http://www.folger.edu/template.cfm?cid=3999/ link] offers a list of programs which celebrated 1,000 years of women writers in tandem with the ''Shakespeare's Sisters'' exhibition.


== Related Programs: 1000 Years of Women Writers ==
== Suggestions for further reading ==


== Further Reading ==
The following [http://www.folger.edu/Content/Whats-On/Folger-Exhibitions/Past-Exhibitions/Shakespeares-Sisters/Further-Reading.cfm/ list] is not meant to be comprehensive but to provide at least one modern edition and one fairly recent biography for each author, when such is available.  In many cases, modern editions of the works contain good biographical introductions.  Though there are many excellent works in other languages, this list focuses on books in English for purposes of accessibility.


==[[Shakespeare's Sisters Item List]]==
==[[Shakespeare's Sisters Item List]]==

Revision as of 09:43, 2 June 2014

This revelatory exhibition brings together the works of more than 50 sixteenth- and seventeenth-century women writers from England and continental Europe, writing in formats that range from poems, prose fiction, and memoirs to translations, plays, and more. In all, scholars in recent decades have identified and studied hundreds of women writers from the early modern age.

Shakespeare’s Sisters: Voices of English and European Women Writers, 1500-1700 takes its title from a famous passage in Virginia Woolf’s book A Room of One’s Own (1929), in which Woolf imagines a gifted sister of William Shakespeare, completely thwarted by the social restrictions of his day. Drawing on the breadth and depth of the Folger collection, with additional rare materials from other institutions, Shakespeare’s Sisters presents a far more complex—and fascinating—reality.

Curated by Georgianna Ziegler, the exhibition opened on February 3, 2012, and closed on May 20, 2012. The exhibition was free and open to the public from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., Monday through Saturday, and from noon to 5 p.m. on Sunday. Group tours were available.

About the curator

Georgianna Ziegler is Louis B. Thalheimer Head of Reference at the Folger Shakespeare Library.

After receiving a doctorate at the University of Pennsylvania in early modern English and French literature, Georgianna taught at Davidson College and Wofford College in the Carolinas. She then returned to the University of Pennsylvania where she served as Curator of the Horace Howard Furness Shakespeare Library in the Rare Book Department, while also teaching classes in English literature and pursuing a library degree at Drexel University.

In 1992, Georgianna came to the Folger where, in addition to her reference and teaching work, she has curated several exhibitions, notably Shakespeare’s Unruly Women, and Elizabeth I: Then and Now, as well as co-curating exhibitions on mapping, on Shakespeare in children’s literature, and on the Boydell Shakespeare Gallery.

Georgianna is an active member of the Shakespeare Association of America and the Renaissance Society of America, and has published on Shakespeare’s heroines, on Elizabeth I and Elizabeth of Bohemia, and on the calligrapher Esther Inglis. She has recently finished a book manuscript, Domesticating the Bard: Women and Shakespeare 1790-1890.

Curator's insights

"I've been interested for years in early women writers," says Ziegler. "It's been something new and exciting in early modern studies over the past 30 to 40 years, a whole new area to find and develop. In the past, women hadn't received much attention from scholars of the early modern era, but then in the 1980s and 1990s, there was a lot of archival work to find writing by early modern women writers. Now we're into a new generation, where young scholars write secondary works about what has been found. But the digging goes on, too. And scholars come to the Folger to do this research."

"I hope visitors to the exhibition come away excited by the idea of all of these women writers at an early time," she says. "Most people aren't aware of how many there were and how varied their writings were"—and not just in England. "I wanted to include continental writers, too," she says, including Italian, French, and other women authors, playwrights, and poets, whose works are well represented in the Folger's large continental collection.

Among Ziegler's many favorites in the exhibition are the small, stunningly bound books of Psalms by calligrapher Esther Inglis. "I have always liked those calligraphic books," she says. "I've written about Inglis before, and I also wrote the entry about her in the Biographical Dictionary of Scottish Women."

The Inglis books are typical of the exhibition in another way. "As I pulled the books for the exhibition, a pattern emerged: many were tiny or small. These are books of poems, Psalms, and plays, which you would expect to be in a small format. Even the Italian women's heroic romance tales are often small. The topics tend to be personal. The rare collection of Marguerites or poems by Queen Marguerite of Navarre, which we have on loan, is beautiful and it fits in your hand. As a queen, she could have afforded a larger book. That's also true of Queen Katherine Parr's book of prayers, which is in the exhibition, too. To me, the size suggests intimacy."

One of the exceptions to the rule is a large volume of plays by Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newscastle—a rare book that also produced a surprise. As the Cavendish book was being prepared for the exhibition, a previously hidden inscription was uncovered: "Mary [last name illegible], Her Booke Giuen by her Grace the Duches of Newcastle." As Ziegler explains, "We knew that Cavendish gave her books to friends with her corrections to the text in them." Before finding the inscription, however, "we never thought the notes in this copy were her own. Now we have to check to see if they were. We are trying to identify 'Mary,' too, although an ultraviolet (UV) photograph didn't make her last name readable." And so, in Ziegler's phrase, the "digging" into the rich subject of early modern women writers continues on.

Multimedia experiences

Explore Shakespeare's Sisters online, or on an audio tour.

An online exhibition for children offers an additional multimedia experience.

The Mancini Sisters

Elizabeth Goldsmith, author of The Kings' Mistresses: The Liberated Lives of Marie Mancini, Princess Colonna, and Her Sister Hortense, Duchess Mazarin and a contributor to the Folger exhibition Shakespeare's Sisters: Voices of European Women, 1500-1700, shares her thoughts on the remarkable lives of Marie and Hortense Mancini.

Marie and Hortense Mancini seem like such incredible women, very ahead of their time. Why don’t more people know about them today?

That’s an interesting question. In the United States, most people don’t know about them. Bits and pieces of their lives are very well known in France and in England. In Marie’s case, this is the story of her romance with Louis XIV. In French history, their teenage romance has become a legend confirming the process of growing up that Louis had to do, because he had to sacrifice her in order to make a royal marriage. But the rest of their lives are less known.

There were actually more Mancinis than just Marie and Hortense. What happened to the other girls?

There were three other sisters; each of them had interesting lives as well and was successfully married off. The oldest was Laure Mancini. She married a French nobleman but died young, in her 20s, in childbirth.

Olympia married Eugene Maurice, Count of Soissons, and took advantage of it right away. She was more of an intriguer. In the end, she was implicated in some scandalous criminal affairs at the French court and exiled for a period. She was not a timid soul by any means!

The youngest was Marie-Anne. She married a duke, Godefroy Maurice de La Tour d'Auvergne, and ran a sophisticated salon in Paris for writers and artists.

What do we know about the marriages of Marie and Hortense Mancini, and their experiences as royal mistresses?

After Marie’s experience as the mistress of Louis XIV she was exiled to a remote fortress on the Atlantic coast. She was released after she agreed to an arranged marriage to Lorenzo Colonna.

It seems the first years of the marriage weren’t that unhappy. She enjoyed a lot of prestige and he enjoyed having a highly-placed French wife. After they had three children, Lorenzo started having affairs, which enraged Marie. She decided she wanted what was known as “a separation of beds,” and he wasn’t willing to grant her that, and their relationship became very tense. She started fearing that he would plot to kill her and marry someone else. He was capable of it, he’d orchestrated the deaths of his enemies before.

Hortense had a clearly miserable marriage from the beginning. She was married to a religious fanatic who was also half-mad. She tried legal means to get a separation and wasn’t able to get it. So she decided she needed to just run away. She had had four children in four years and was 22 when she left.

Everyone took a look at Hortense’s husband and knew immediately why she left, but Marie’s husband was more subtle. His was a cat and mouse game.

What were the contemporary reactions to Marie and Hortense?

It’s hard to find much concrete evidence of expressions of envy or admiration, although they did have some prominent advocates who fought on their behalf. There is a lot of press coverage that tends towards gossipy and scandalous. There is a lot of observation of their movements and speculation about where they would travel, and people following them with excitement.

There are also some more intellectual debates about the whole question of divorce, and under what circumstance does a woman have a right to split from her husband and retain her dowry. Then we have letters where people are writing about them; in one case, there are letters between a man and woman and the man is much more sympathetic to Hortense. So reactions don’t always divide along gender lines.

Did Marie and Hortense Mancini view themselves as revolutionary?

I don’t think they saw what they were doing as contributing to a political or ideological movement. But they were definitely iconoclastic and opposed a number of injustices that women of their time had to face. In their memoirs and in their lives, they are advocating for other women and for themselves.

For more information on the Mancini Sisters, visit the online exhibition or watch this video.

Scholar's insights

What would have happened had Shakespeare had a wonderfully gifted sister, called Judith, let us say ...

... it takes little skill in psychology to be sure that a highly gifted girl who had tried to use her gift for poetry would have been so thwarted and hindered ... that she would have lost her health and sanity.

– Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own

Virginia Woolf' held a grim view of women's writing during the age of Shakespeare, in large part because she was entirely unaware of just how many women were writing. Woolf was aware of a few early women writers, but she had no idea how many women actually were writing, because many of their works circulated in manuscript and were never published. Among the women she read about were seventeenth-century diarist and historian Lady Anne Clifford, the women of the French Salons, and Mary Sidney and Mary Wroth. But others—women writing about love and heroic romances; women writing plays to be read and performed; women translating religious works—these she did not know of. As the exhibition explores the work of these women, from Mary Sidney and Laura Battiferri, and Louise Labé to Aphra Behn, it challenges Woolf ’s notion that women were unable to rise above their gender to create lasting works.

In recent decades, modern scholars have discovered or rediscovered many works that lay critically neglected for years. In the following pages, these scholars give their insights into the rich literary lives of the women who truly were Shakespeare's sisters.

Related publication

Shakespeare's Sisters: Women Writers Bridge Five Centuries (2012), inspired by the exhibition, is a collection of new works by thirteen prominent women poets and authors—among them, former U.S. poets laureate Rita Dove and Maxine Kumin and Pulitzer Prize winning novelist Jane Smiley. In this limited edition, handbound chapbook, each writer responds to works by sixteenth- and seventeenth-century women writers.

Among those voices:

  • Jane Smiley, whose story "Marguerite, Queen of Navarre, Gives Desdemona Advice," reimagines Othello in letters between sixteenth-century writers Marguerite de Navarre and Vittoria Colonna and Shakespeare's Desdemona
  • Rita Dove, on the future Elizabeth I, writing with a diamond on a window while confined at a lodge at the direction of her sister, Mary I
  • Rosanna Warren, who urges the sixteenth-century poet Mary Sidney, creator of stunningly varied Psalm translations, to "translate us too"
  • Maxine Kumin, in "Sonnets Uncorseted," on the prolific seventeenth-century poet and author Margaret Cavendish
  • Elizabeth Nunez, on echoes of past literary salons in her grandmother's and other women's "Bloomsbury groups" in 1940s to 1960s Trinidad
  • And still more from Elizabeth Alexander, Eavan Boland, Linda Gregerson, Jane Hirshfield, Marie Howe, Heather McHugh, Jacqueline Osherow, and Linda Pastan

Related programs

This link offers a list of programs which celebrated 1,000 years of women writers in tandem with the Shakespeare's Sisters exhibition.

Suggestions for further reading

The following list is not meant to be comprehensive but to provide at least one modern edition and one fairly recent biography for each author, when such is available. In many cases, modern editions of the works contain good biographical introductions. Though there are many excellent works in other languages, this list focuses on books in English for purposes of accessibility.

Shakespeare's Sisters Item List