Women, Jewish History, European History

I started out in the 1950s as a historian of Europe, thrilled to be doing a new kind of social history where I sought connections between French working people and Protestant religious change in the sixteenth century. In the years since then, my intellectual adventure has been the expansion of my world of historical actors--to include women as well as men, to follow Jews and Catholics and now Muslims in their historical trajectories. I had the joy of assigning my first major text in Jewish history in 1971, when I had my students read Glikl Hamel's autobiography for my new University of Toronto course entitled Society and the Sexes in Early Modern Europe. Finding sources for early modern women was a challenge, when so many of them could not read or write. I located autobiographical writing by Protestant and Catholic women, but what to do about a Jewish woman? By good fortune, a literary friend--the late Rosalie Colie--had seen reference to a book entitled The Life of Glückel of Hameln, 1646-1724, Written by Herself.