Accounting for Early Modern Women in the Arts: Reconsidering Women’s Agency, Networks, and Relationships

At first glance, notions of female agency, collectivity, and social networks seem like constructs of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Scholars commonly work from assumptions about gender in the early modern social, economic, and political realms that preclude these considerations: many assume that women were universally expected to stay home, obey their husbands, and rear their children. In this chapter, we argue that women frequently defied these expectations; they participated in the familial economy and were visible in the public sphere. Our methodological framework derives from contemporary social network theory, feminist calls for intervention into history, and conceptions and rationales