• Women’s Agency in Early Modern Europe
• Kate Allan (bio) and Nupur Patel (bio)

Agency has long been a touchstone in early modern scholarship, and in scholarship of women’s and gender studies. Since at least the 1970s, scholars have emphasised how ‘individuals and groups beyond white male elites had the capacity to act, make choices, and intentionally shape their own lives and the world around them to some degree’.¹ Influential modes of thinking have understood agency variously as a woman’s capacity to act for herself; to speak on behalf of herself or a collective; to have influence over and exert power in a variety of contexts, including social networks, domestic, religious, and political settings, and through the written word.² Others have framed agency as a ‘more open ended’ concept, focusing our attention on the negotiation of power to account for cases where we do not see women, as ‘the subordinate subjects[,] challenge the system of rule in systematic or revolutionary ways’.³ This approach to agency has shown that action is not always subversive and that expressions of agency may include survival and existence.⁴ Scholarly debate has grappled with how we might define agency with any degree of specificity, how we can identify the historically contingent forms of agency, and what an awareness of agency contributes to the study of early modern women.⁵ Most recently, this research has highlighted that agency is most productive as a ‘conceptual tool’, a starting point, rather than a predefined notion. Approaching agency in this way allows us to move away from a simple conception of a woman as ‘having agency’ towards a more nuanced understanding [End Page 1] of how agency was expressed through a diverse range of material, textual, and social structures or practices.⁶

Recent scholarship about women’s participation in transnational communities and about transcultural mobility and identity more broadly has invested female agency—too frequently afforded to women only in the domestic domain—with a global significance. At the same time as agency has been recognised as historically and socially contingent, scholars have explored how it is determined by local, regional, national, and transcultural affiliations.⁷ Criticism on agency increasingly attends to ‘the way that social rank, marital status, chronological and geographical location affected women’s agency’.⁸ Collaborative and comparative approaches to early modern literature and culture have dramatically reshaped our understandings of female cross-cultural production, uncovering, for instance, women’s agency as travellers and the way this shaped their literary representation.⁹ As the field of women’s writing increasingly explores broader models of authorial agency in literary production, so does it prompt us to attend to ‘the full complexities of the locations the writing comes from, and how and why that locatedness matters’.¹⁰

This special issue takes its cue from Merry Wiesner-Hanks’s call in a recent collection, Challenging Women’s Agency and Activism in Early Modernity, for scholarship in women’s and gender history ‘to historicize agency, to use it as a starting point rather than a conclusion’.¹¹ It was a challenge repeated during Wiesner-Hanks’s keynote at the interdisciplinary symposium ‘Women and Agency: Transnational Perspectives, c. 1450–1790’, held virtually at the University of Oxford in June 2021.¹² The symposium sought to explore how women’s agency was negotiated and expressed within the context of the wider social structures in which early modern women lived. It was catalysed not only by scholarship which [End Page 2] has explored early modern women’s multifaceted experiences across literary, cultural, and political spheres, but also by the urgent conversations about women’s agency that have responded globally to anti-violence and anti-discrimination campaigns, including in Mexico, Poland, and Iran. The panels, ‘Creating Agency’, ‘Crafting Agency’, ‘Embodying Agency’, addressed how women asserted agency in different cultural spheres and everyday practices. We turned to the actions of women both individually as ‘Mobile Agents’, and as part of a collective, in ‘Networks of Agency’. Finally, we interrogated early modern expectations surrounding gender roles and case-studies of women who challenged or disrupted those expectations, some in accordance with contemporary literary, philosophical, and political movements, with panels on ‘Challenging...

• 近代早期欧洲的妇女机构
• 凯特·艾伦（简介）和努普尔·帕特尔（简介）

能动性长期以来一直是早期现代学术以及妇女和性别研究学术的试金石。至少从 20 世纪 70 年代开始，学者们就一直强调“白人男性精英之外的个人和群体如何有能力采取行动、做出选择，并在某种程度上有意识地塑造自己的生活和周围的世界”。¹ 有影响力的思维模式将代理权理解为女性为自己行动的能力；代表自己或集体发言；在各种环境中（包括社交网络、家庭、宗教和政治环境）以及通过书面文字施加影响和施加权力。²其他人则将代理视为一个“更加开放式”的概念，将我们的注意力集中在权力谈判上，以解释我们不将女性视为“从属主体”的情况，以系统性或革命性的方式挑战统治体系'.³这种代理方法表明，行动并不总是具有颠覆性，代理的表达可能包括生存和存在。⁴ 学术界争论的焦点是我们如何定义具有任何具体程度的代理，我们如何识别代理的历史偶然形式，以及代理意识对研究有何贡献⁵最近，这项研究强调，代理作为一种“概念工具”、一个起点，而不是一个工具，是最富有成效的。预定义的概念。以这种方式探讨代理可以让我们摆脱对女性“具有代理”的简单概念，转向更细致的理解[End Page 1]代理如何通过各种材料、文本和社会结构或实践来表达。⁶

最近关于女性参与跨国社区以及更广泛的跨文化流动性和身份的学术研究赋予了女性机构（通常只在国内领域赋予女性机构）具有全球意义。在人们认识到能动性具有历史和社会偶然性的同时，学者们也探索了它是如何由地方、区域、国家和跨文化背景决定的。⁷ 对能动性的批评越来越多地关注“社会等级、婚姻状况、时间顺序和地理位置影响女性能动性的方式”。⁸ 协作和比较方法对早期现代文学和文化的研究极大地重塑了我们对女性跨文化生产的理解，例如揭示了女性作为旅行者的代理性以及这塑造了她们的文学表现形式的方式。⁹ 随着女性写作领域越来越多地探索文学创作中更广泛的作者代理模式，它是否促使我们关注“写作来源地的全部复杂性，以及这种位置性如何以及为何重要” .¹⁰

本期特刊的灵感源自 Merry Wiesner-Hanks 在最近的合集中的呼吁：挑战早期现代性中的妇女能动性和行动主义，妇女和性别史领域的学术研究“将能动性历史化，将其作为起点而不是结论”。¹¹这是 Wiesner 期间重复的一个挑战-汉克斯在跨学科研讨会“女性与机构：跨国视角”上的主题演讲，c。 1450–1790'，于 2021 年 6 月在牛津大学虚拟举行。¹² 该研讨会旨在探讨如何在这一背景下协商和表达妇女的能动性早期现代女性所生活的更广泛的社会结构。它不仅受到学术研究的推动，[结束第 2 页] 探索了早期现代女性在文学、文化和政治领域的多方面经历，而且还受到关于妇女机构的紧急对话，该机构在全球范围内响应反暴力和反歧视运动，包括在墨西哥、波兰和伊朗。 “创建机构”、“打造机构”、“体现机构”专题小组讨论了女性如何在不同文化领域和日常实践中维护机构。我们转向女性作为“移动代理人”的个体行动，以及作为“代理网络”中集体的一部分的女性行动。最后，我们询问了早期现代围绕性别角色的期望，并对挑战或破坏这些期望的女性进行了案例研究，其中一些与当代文学、哲学和政治运动相一致，并以“挑战……”为主题的小组讨论。