Patricia Anne Simpson, "Early Modern Women's Work: Kinship, Community, and Social Justice" (Routledge, 2025)

Summary

Podcast Summary

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Podcast: New Books Network

Episode: Patricia Anne Simpson, "Early Modern Women's Work: Kinship, Community, and Social Justice" (Routledge, 2025)
Date: November 30, 2025
Host: Yana Byers
Guest: Patricia Ann Simpson

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Overview

This episode features an in-depth conversation with Patricia Ann Simpson about her new book, Early Modern Women's Work: Kinship, Community, and Social Justice. The interview explores how privileged women in early modern northern and central Europe engaged in labor—intellectual, emotional, and manual—that often fell outside the traditional, male-defined historical canon. The discussion delves into historical reinterpretations of kinship, community, and social justice, highlighting how women’s work shaped and subverted societal norms from the 16th to early 18th centuries.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

Genesis of the Book & Approach (02:43)

• Simpson traces the origin of the book to ongoing scholarly collaboration and friendship with Carol Levin, emphasizing inter-disciplinary and transnational approaches to women's history.
• Simpson was prompted to "redeem the image of Eve from the misogynist representation of Eve in early modern culture."
• The book is influenced by dialogue with German research on the history of emotions, looking for "emotional communities" formed by early modern women (04:53).

Challenging Canonical Interpretations (07:43)

• Standard histories, written mostly by elite Western men, placed women in passive, private, domestic roles.
• Simpson investigates "models of kinship and community that broke those molds," acknowledging the term "gesellschaft" already contains a gendered labor hierarchy (08:06).
• Privileged women like Maria Katharina Prestel contributed to family businesses, sometimes independently supporting their families through skilled, respected work (09:10).

"I see in the early modern period that that model [division of rational men and emotional women] is not yet in place. And there are exceptions and maybe they're leveraged by privilege..." — Patricia Simpson (15:40)

Women’s Education and Religious Influence (10:45)

• Access to education and skilled labor often came through relationships with religious reform movements, especially Protestant sects (pietism).
• These sects promoted literacy as a path to personal religious engagement, opening doors for women’s intellectual labor.
• Women used writing and the arts to process experiences like loss, aging, and public engagement, often creating supportive enclaves or communities.

Notable Example:

"I look at acts of writing as acts of mourning, acts of writing that do the work of mourning..." — Patricia Simpson (12:43)

Emotional Labor: The Work of Mourning (17:41)

• The first chapter focuses on how women turned grief (pregnancy loss, bereavement) into creative, pedagogical, and public acts.
• Anna Cuffeline’s woodcut of the imaginary "Kinderhaus" symbolized both personal loss and a creation of public meaning, teaching household management (18:14).
• The act of mourning through writing, especially publicly, became a subversive form of emotional labor, sometimes challenging both social and religious comfort zones.

"Thus be witness mute suffering of my sadness." — Simpson reading Margaretha Susanna von Kunsch (25:40)

• Simpson explores the concept of "maternality"—the maternal as community care, beyond biological motherhood (27:30).

Women Publicly Intervening: Anna Ovena Hoyers (29:36)

• Hoyers’ life and work highlight women’s public engagement and authorship, especially in support of religious minorities.
• After widowhood, she managed estates, took up writing, and offered refuge to heterodox groups like Anabaptists.
• Hoyers’ writings were angry and forceful, leveraging her status and emotion to critique corruption and advocate for social justice.

"She makes her own authority. She assumes that agency and is extremely unapologetic about it." — Patricia Simpson (37:41)

• Despite persecution (her books were burned), Hoyers persisted in advocating unification through love, ultimately dying in poverty and relative obscurity.

Women and Natural Science: Maria Sibylla Merian & Agnes Block (41:22)

• Merian, an artist and entomologist, subverted gender and scientific norms by focusing on insects and plants, collaborating with indigenous and enslaved peoples during her time in Suriname.
• Despite benefiting from colonial networks, Merian used her skills to produce scientifically important works, helped by a circle of women like collector/artist Agnes Block.
• Both navigated societal constraints using the word "amateur" as "lover of" (nature, art), marking a distinction from male-dominated scientific authority.

"She curls, she cuts. This life, makes a life for herself. That does not suit this narrative." — Yana Byers (41:11)

• Notions of collective authorship and community, rather than individual genius, underpin much of these women’s creativity (51:11).

The Importance of Community and Networks (51:11)

• Simpson emphasizes the communal and often transnational nature of women’s networks, extending support, patronage, and protection beyond kinship lines.
• Community bonds were "forged through work," creating spaces for women’s labor and leadership despite social constraints.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Gendered Work:
  "There are women in this time period who are engaged actively in optimizing their skills, their training, their intellectual capacities... to create spaces in which work can take place..." (53:30)
• On Mourning and Writing:
  "I just was incredibly and deeply moved by this kind of articulation of loss. And even today we don't have a good category for mourning a miscarriage." (26:00)
• On Anger and Authority:
  "Women aren't allowed to be angry. Women's anger is hysteria... And she just goes with it." (35:20)
• On Collectivity:
  "There's not a sense of ownership, and there's not necessarily a sense of entitlement... these bonds are forged through work." (51:38)

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Timestamps: Key Segments

• Genesis of Book & Career Path: 02:43
• Challenge to Canonical History: 07:43
• Role of Religion and Access to Labor: 10:45
• Emotional Labor & Mourning: 17:41
• Reading from Margaretha Susanna von Kunsch: 25:40
• Concept of “Maternality”: 27:30
• Ana Ovena Hoyers & Authority: 29:36
• Maria Sibylla Merian and Natural Science: 41:22
• Community and Networks: 51:11
• Lessons from the Book: 53:14
• Next Projects: 55:34

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Lessons & Broader Insights

• Simpson redefines "women's work" as multi-layered, emphasizing how elite women’s emotional, intellectual, and artisanal labor both conformed to and subverted societal constraints.
• The history of early modern women is one of unexpected agency, collectivity, and innovation—stretching the definitions of kinship, community, and social justice in ways that resonate with contemporary concerns.
• The book’s final takeaway: labor in early modern Europe was ubiquitous, but the types of work women performed and their historical visibility remain underappreciated and misrepresented by traditional narratives.

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Closing Note:
Patricia Ann Simpson’s scholarship throws much-needed light on the creative, collective, and subversive dimensions of women’s work in early modern Europe, offering a richer and more just historical memory.

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Transcript

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[A]

Welcome to the New Books Network.

[D]

Hello everyone and welcome back to New Books in Early Modern History, a channel on the New Books Network. I'm Yana Byers, your host, and I'm here today with Patricia Ann Simpson to talk about her new book, Early Modern Women's Kinship, Community and Social justice, out this year, 2025 with Routledge. Hello, Patricia.

[E]

Hello, Yana. And thank you so much for inviting me to be on your podcast.

[D]

Thank you so much for joining me. How are you this morning?

[E]

I'm doing quite well. I am enjoying a holiday week in New York City on a short break from my duties as Professor German and Lincoln, Nebraska.

[D]

Fantastic. It's a nice break from Lincoln, Nebraska. The city. That'll do. All right. So this book, how did you come to write about early modern women's work? This book in particular, how did you come to this?

[E]

In many ways, this book is a product of an ongoing conversation with my colleague and friend Carol Levin, who is a specialist in early modern England and in particular on the life and work of Elizabeth I. She was central in founding Queenship studies and she is a partner in many endeavors in Lincoln, Nebraska. And we formed a kind of alliance and our own sense of kinship when working together curating an exhibit Beyond Eve and mary for the pre1800 collection at the Sheldon Museum of Art on our very own Lincoln campus. And the range of this is a small university museum, but with a very, very impressive range of artworks, primarily prints and drawings from before 1800. And we became quite enthused over the products of our dialogue. This was an extremely, extremely successful exhibit. It was widely visited. And we joined forces to on a effort to redeem the image of Eve from the misogynist representation of Eve in early modern culture. She came to co edit a series for Routledge on new interdisciplinary approaches to early modern culture, confluences and contexts, and urged me out of my comfort zone. My primary area of training is in German literature and philosophy around 1800. So she nudged me backwards and urged me in our conversations to explore, invade her territory, her school scholarly territory, so to speak. And I was also, at the time of our conversations, paying much closer attention to the kind of scholarship being done from the Federal Republic, from large and prestigious research centers on the history of the emotions. And we have extremely widespread contemporary notions of what emotional labor looks like and what intellectual labor looks like. And I was compelled by the trans historical the kind of continuities in the marginalization of female contributions to the workforce, to labor, particularly with regard to ideas and practices of emotional labor and intellectual labor. And it went in search of these kind of alternative spaces, these alternative collectives that established what some contemporary scholars refer to as emotional communities. And I found them manifest in very different ways, primarily in what we consider now to be northern and central Europe, among these enclaves of women artists, intellectuals, religious leaders and entrepreneurs who were in many ways conforming to prevailing ideas of what community and society should look like, but also in subversive ways, challenging those hegemonic norms of a male dominated, patriarchal, hierarchical organization of society. I was also compelled to historicize and reimagine the contemporary ideas of kinship, of community and social justice. And I tried not to be too anachronistic in My approach to these. To these issues. But they are manifest and they look different from the way that we see them, we see them today. And I did, and I found a variety, a range of these largely privileged women who engaged in real work, but they tend to be rendered invisible in the course of the writing of canonical early modern European history.

[D]

Yeah, so we've got the parameters here. You've gone back in time from your usual thing. You're looking at largely the 16th and 17th centuries. Yeah, yes.

[E]

Into the early 18th century and in.

[D]

The north country, which you are kind of familiar with. And so before we go any further, let's talk about this canonical interpretation of what women did. This canonical interpretation, largely penned by elite Western men in the university system. What's the role afforded to women there?

[E]

Well, and largely by historians and social scientists who are implementing the tools that are largely produced in the 18th century as a direct result of the kind of binary oppositions between male and female, between public and private spheres, between active and passive, between the sort of the active life, the political life, public life, the life of power and private life, which is largely relegated to the domestic sphere. And I went in search of models of kinship and community that broke those molds. Even the word, the German word gesellschaft, society, if one looks into the etymology of that word, it comes from the term geselle, which is derived from the guild system, the medieval guild system, and it means a journeyman. And already in the word gesellschaft, there is a kind of presumption of trained laborers who are in a labor hierarchy that is regulated and largely male. And in the early modern period, we have these kind of exceptions, blossoming women who were the daughters or eventually husbands of trained artisans, of master engravers or goldsmiths, woodcutters, and who contributed actively to the family business. In a couple of cases, the artists I write about, like Maria Katarina Prestel, would grow up in an artisanal family and marry an artisan, but eventually leave him with two of the children in his care and two of the children in her care, and go to London to work for a book publisher, Boydle, and help support the family. She was highly respected, independent, skilled worker. And she is one of the visual artists whose life and work fascinated me. And we see these kind of traditional, more canonical studies of society and work that tend not to look at these. And I will say, and I write about this in the introduction, these are women of privilege. These are women who had, for various reasons, access some form of education to levels of training in languages, in the visual arts, in drawing and Painting and sketching and engraving, not open to all. Some had access to that kind of privilege because of their relationship to Lutheranism and to various Protestant sects that emerged at the time. I'm thinking in particular of pietism, influenced by the work of Spaena and others. But pietism worked on. Worked on the basis of a critique of certain kinds of corruption in the clergy, but also the belief in a personal relationship to God and to the Bible. This required education. This required the ability to read. So we have what could be considered the sort of the normative strictures of organized religion, again dominated for the most part by male clergy. But there are opportunities for a very, very steep learning curve in terms of reading and writing. And I look at acts of writing, acts of writing as acts of mourning, acts of writing that do the work of mourning, particularly in the first chapter of the book. When I focus on an enclave of women in Altenburg who largely write about pregnancy loss and stillbirth, miscarriage as a metaphor, the aging process. And when I get to the work on the third chapter of Ana Ovina Hoyos, she is writing from the perspective of a post menopausal woman. And she, instead of conforming to the idea that a woman aging has outlived her usefulness in a system that acknowledges only her humanity because of her capacity for reproduction, she uses her status as an old woman to intervene in political debates across the channel in England. So there's a self awareness in the part of these women artists, activists, intellectuals, writers, educators and entrepreneurs that they are self fashioning a kind of community and a kind of. And a certain kind of leadership that is specific to being female. And again, it is helpful for us all to remember that this is all unfolding at a time when in much of Europe we are looking at witch trials and persecutions and executions and also scholarly debates about whether or not women are human.

[D]

Yeah. Whether. Yeah. The worst of women. Indeed. Yeah. Whether women are capable of reason or.

[E]

Whether exactly women are. Whether or not women are capable of reason. And this is also one of the. One of the. This is what part of the reason I go back to a kind of pre Kantian time period because we have a sort of division that takes place Enlightenment and post Enlightenment era that becomes sort of constitutive of Eurocentric thought. That there that the mental faculties are divided in a way that privileges reason and understanding and judgment. And we get at the same time a kind of division of labor across a gender specific division of labor in which men take care of the whole reason thing. And women take care of the emotions, and the emotions stay at home. And I see in the early modern period that that model is not yet in place. And there are exceptions and maybe they're leveraged by privilege, indeed. And the ability, for example, to own property, to purchase property, and to create these alternative spaces, these kind of, to use one of Michel Foucault's terms, a heterotopia, a real space that exists within society but makes its own rules. And I see some of these, some of these, the women I write about in the study as fashioning those spaces, designing those spaces, and in one case, literally designing, designing her palace. And that's work.

[D]

That is work. That's absolutely work.

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[D]

So let's go a little bit deeper into your argument and how this works. Your first chapter, as you noted, is called Emotional labor, the Work of Mourning and it's an interesting choice and I want to know why you wanted to start with mourning.

[E]

Well, I Again, there's remarkable there are elements of trying in this enclave of writers. This particular chapter opens with a woodcut by Anna Cefalin, who is married into a family in Nuremberg called The Kinderhaus, the House of Children, the children's House. And I wrote about this particular woodcut in another of my monographs published several years ago, called the Play World. And it was just a footnote in that book. And I remained fascinated by Anna Cuffeline's work. First of all, she collaborated with her husband, a woodcutter, to produce this engraving. And it is an imaginary house which she drafted in a kind of subliminal act of mourning, because she lost two children and had none of her own. And she took that impulse of loss and turned it into this kind of. She made it into work. She made it into. She designed it. Her husband, with the help of her husband, she produced this broadsheet. They had a model of it built and they sold tickets. And it was thought of as a kind of pedagogical project to instruct the children of the well, to do, certainly, on how to produce a household, on how to run a household. So I had at the very beginning, the number of. And again, the statistics on women who died in childbirth, or the number of stillbirths and miscarriages and children who lost before the age of five. It is very difficult to determine specifically numbers in this period, but just the rate. Some estimates are as high as 50% of pregnancies ended with the death of a child or stillborn child. And this is again a kind of hidden statistic. This is not something that we see in a. In canonical histories. We have a kind of quiet, hidden history of that loss. Somebody like Anna Cuffeline makes it public. And the group of women around, in this residence, seat of power, Altenburg, which is in Thuringia, group of women writing to each other, related by blood or marriage, and a couple of extra outside cousins writing to each other about these losses. And I owe a great deal to the archival work of the scholar Anna Kadus, who produced this volume. But in that volume, the idea of Weiblich, Werk, woman's work, that word werk comes up in a very emblematic way. It is often used in this time period and kind of in religious texts, in vott und werk, in word and deed. But that idea of female work, of women's work, and putting pressure on that signifier, werk indicates both product and process, and connected quite, quite urgently to me with the work of mourning and with that primary sense of emotional labor that these women were doing. And again, it's their. Their. Their. Their dialogue, their conversation starts off as private, but in the course over. Over the course of time. Margaretha Susanna von Kunsch's relatives, her son in law wrote to, urged her to publish her work and edited it and made it, made it public. And that in itself suggested to me a kind of. Over a kind of bridge, a kind of segue between that kind of private mourning and then the act of making it public in writing. And this is again where one of my sort of, I suppose, interdisciplinary methodologies. I'm trained primarily as a literary scholar and at cultural studies methodologies as well. But the. So I take the kind of a large context, but work with individual poems, individual texts, individual sketches, drawings, engravings, to read the details that connect these women across disciplines, across geographic locations, and also over the course of a century. And I saw it, for example, in the work of Kunsch, in particular, an awareness that her acts of writing and acts of mourning went beyond what was given, what is allowed by, in the Protestant Church to. Went beyond the act of mourning. You were given certain leeway for loss. But she and also some of her interlocutors, women interlocutors, question the consolation of faith. So even while engaged in this kind of subversive work, even while engaged in this kind of act of mourning, they're pushing the limits of what was considered the acceptable emotional expression, because at some point they failed to accept the consolation of the faith. And I wonder if I might just read one short stanza in my translation. And this is Kunsch commemorating the death of a prematurely born daughter. And this is after a range of. Of other deaths. Her fifth born son, for example, had died just earlier that year. And she changes in terms of her.

[D]

Form.

[E]

From very long poetic lines to much short ones. Dihant et sitatmya. My hand trembles, my pen refuses to do its duty, the paper shakes, and I cannot bear the words of pain. Thus be witness mute suffering of my sadness. And this kind of. I just was incredibly and deeply moved by this kind of articulation of loss. And even today we don't have a good category for mourning a miscarriage. And across centuries, I saw one.

[D]

Woman.

[E]

In the 17th century and her enclave of women writers breaking that silence and making it possible to acknowledge even her chosen act of mourning, which is the act of writing, even its limits in providing consolation for the kind of emotional loss that she was sustained, that she had sustained. And I see this as well, carrying into the second chapter in the idea of maternality. And editors and a copy editor questioned my use of the term. Don't you mean maternity? And maternality is not specifically maternity, it is in use in English language as early as you know, the 1720s and early 1730s to indicate the qualities of being maternal but not specific to blood, not specific to the actual mother, child bond. And so that characteristic of what becomes in, I think, post 18th century ideas about public and private spheres and male predominance in reason and women's domain of the heart. There is an opportunity prior to that large historical epistemological intervention for women to function for the qualities of maternality to pertain not only to one's family but also to a community. I looked for example, for definition. The etymology of the German word Mitterlich, motherly maternal didn't quite cut it for me. And in contemporary or slightly later, late 17th, early 18th century dictionaries, there are often definitions of Mitterlich as maternal. But then the examples given are all male figures from the Bible who behaved with, you know, in acts of love. So I wanted to go back to the acts of the relationship between an acknowledgment of the historically correct importance of women in terms of their ability to, within the sanction of marriage, produce children. But also take that out of the kind of private sphere and look at the ways in which these particular agents of history, female agents of history, go beyond those bonds.

[D]

We see a lot of this like transgression into what is a very considered public sphere. I mean, I'd like to talk about Anna Ovena Hoyers. I'm sure I'm pronouncing that horribly.

[E]

No, no, you got it.

[D]

Fabulous. A very forceful writer. Can you tell our listeners about her?

[E]

Ana Ubena Hoyos. That is my chapter on writing for your life on refuge and precarity. And again, Hoyas was born into a well to do family, married well, brought a dowry with her to help her husband out of debt and took on a. After her husband's death, she took up the causes of religious sects, Anabaptists, for example, who had at first been given a kind of. They were. Tended to be wealthy and educated and trained and they were given. Given sanction. They were given refuge in parts of German speaking Europe. But when she became mistress of her own manor and ended up managing several of her husband's estates, although she ended up selling them off all of them, she. She started writing. She wrote at first, had been involved while she was married, while her husband still lived, working on translations. But her writing became extremely aggressive. She called out corruption where she sought and she was doing things like cohabiting with Anabaptists in her house with her children and practicing certain rituals, certain rites, baptisms for example, in her corner church. And this, of course, was extremely heterodox. She got in trouble in her hometown. Her books were burned. But again, this is at a time when witches were being persecuted and tried. So she perhaps got off a bit lucky because only her books were burned. But she wrote a series of poems and very motivated translations to. Based on her experience of the changing female body as a mother, she wrote a dialogue to a child in which she takes on the role of a spiritual advisor. The female figure, the female interlocutor, is interpreting the faith for her male child. She writes these very moving poems about her attempts to forge communities often shaped by religious heterodoxy. And she questions the corruption of established clergy, referring to them as swallows who migrate in winter, the swallows who abandon their friendship and their loyalties and their obligations of the faith when it's convenient for them. She also condemns avarice, condemns greed, condemns the accumulation of personal wealth, and sees the. And this is for me, a kind of historicization of an idea of social justice in which the renunciation of personal wealth for the benefit of others is not necessarily acknowledged as such. But she cautions against the. A subversive society of false friends and the false promise of worldly goods. And she has a very powerful emblematic image of building high castles on a foundation of sand. And with those two images, the swallows in winter and the high castles built on sand really struck me as the kind of signature of the kind of work she was doing. She also needed patronage and at some point appealed to Maria Eleonore of Brandenburg, who became the Queen of Sweden and the regent after Gustav Adolt's death. And she does a very pedagogically inspired German translation of A book of Ruth, trying to forge a kind of calling card for herself to a fellow widow and to acknowledge the stages of life as a daughter, as a wife, as a mother, and as a widow, and then as an old woman. Now, she's not necessarily. I wouldn't call her. And some have tried to sort of see her as a kind of proto feminist or not proto feminist. Her work is often criticized because it's not as rhetorically polished as, say, for example, Katharina von Greifenberg, probably the best known of German language Baroque women poets. But there's a kind of immediacy, a kind of rawness and anger in her work. Now, this is again something that resonates with me today. Women aren't allowed to be angry. Women's anger is hysteria. It's, excuse me, bitchiness it's marginalized and it is condemned in the public sphere. And she just goes with it. She just occupies that anger. Now in some ways, in a poem about advice to her sons not to marry older widows, it's because they have. They're right, exactly. They have dried up and are no longer capable of reproduction. So stay away from them. Stick with the. Stick with the. The fertile, I suppose. And yet. So that is. So it's a little bit difficult to be sort of to. To. To have a kind of tidy feminist reading of. Of. Of her work. But what I admire about it is. Is her ability to articulate her emotions and including the negative emotions which were then, as now, I believe, considered unladylike, considered unfeminine, considered inappropriate. And she uses it to intervene in political shenanigans in England. She, in her eins schreiben uber are riding across the sea from an old woman. I am old and not from where you are. But you betrayed your king. And that is. That is worth condemning. That is to be condemned.

[D]

Yeah. And she. She feels she has the authority to do so.

[E]

She makes her own authority. She assumes that agency. She assumes that agency and. And is. Is extremely unapologetic about it.

[D]

It.

[E]

But one of the things that she does do, while she is acknowledging the differences and the. The among these various Protestant sects, she nonetheless advocates for a belief in the unifying power of love to overcome those conflicts, to overcome those differences. So even through the evidence of anger and contempt and condemnation in some of her work elsewhere, in other parts of her work, she capacity of love to transcend those worldly differences. She did eventually end up in exile and refuge. She sought refuge in Sweden and died there in her own, living a life of very, very quiet poverty on the margins of that society. But she is largely large. Her works are largely forgotten. Not good enough to be considered in canonical literature of the time. But I was attracted to her feistiness. Close your eyes. Exhale.

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That's how good leads the way.

[D]

As you should be feisty. She is. I mean, she doesn't fit the narrative of, you know, our early modern narrative either. She doesn't suit, like, what. What we want, what we need to be the case. Right. To fit this traditional, you know, canonical interpretation. And neither does Maria Sibylla. Sibylla Marianne. In a equal, like, very different but equally forceful way. She, she curls, she cuts. This life, makes a life for herself. That does not suit this narrative.

[E]

Oh, not in least. And she is, of course, the best known of, of the, the women artists and, and, and writers and religious leaders that I, I talk about and in, in the book. And she is, I, I just, I, I fell in love with her, with, with her work years, years, years before this, this book was even, even a glimmer in my consciousness. But she, her, her work, I remember first encountering it, the pineapple as a stamp in the United States. And here I was a German studies scholar. I'm like, wait a minute. And then, of course, I did the research. I learned a lot about her life, about her training, about her, her obsession, her love of the natural world and the affinity between plants and insects and just these exquisite pairings that she did between, you know, a horse chestnut and a moth, some of which are staged. But the idea that this woman who married into a prosperous, prosperous family, from a prosperous family, trained as an artist, mucking about with worms, not my thing, her thing, but producing these extraordinarily beautifully detailed. If she started off doing mostly images of flowers and at some point left her husband to join a colony in the Dutch Republic of followers of the French pietist Jean Labadie. And she had to renounce all of her worldly goods. She took two daughters with her. Her husband came to to find her and he was turned away. And she lost the community, lost its luster for her. But through. And this is one of the points, and I try to bring these out throughout the chapters, these points at which her work, even though she is working as a kind of marginalized woman within gifted expert, marginalized woman within this larger society, she came across a collection of objects, entomological butterflies and things, because through the Dutch colonial empire, she saw a kind of wunderkammer of these objects and became fascinated by them. She left the Labatist colony to go with one of her daughters to Suriname with the Dutch West India Company. Now there's a certain amount of bio prospecting involved in this. There was a certain expectation of financial gain trying to find an alternative to silk production, perhaps to challenge Chinese silk production. That is not what Melian was about. She worked with indigenous people during her stay in Suriname and also with enslaved people during her stay there. And the brilliant scholar Landa Scheevinger has written about her reliance on indigenous and enslaved peoples epistemologies to identify certain. Naturally occurring abortion stimulants and. And she drew, she helped. She used local people's knowledge to help her find and cultivate the insects that she wanted. And her daughter became ill. She ended up coming back to, to the Netherlands, to the Dutch Republic and establishing a school. In fact, she did teach her daughters, taught her daughters worked on her prints, they sold them, they printed them. Amsterdam, the Dutch Republic, was extraordinary for its paper trade that produced extraordinary high quality paper. It was a center, I'm sure, as you know, and as your listeners know, a center for book production, extraordinary book production. But she also teamed up with a Mennonite collector and entomologist and possibly artist herself, the woman Agnes Bloch, who after her husband died, bought a manor near the Vecht river and produced her own Blumenbach, or book of flowers and fashioned herself as Flora Batava, you know, on the idea of. And I'm very indebted to the work of the scholar Elizabeth Powell Warren on Agnes Block. And she has a portrait of herself as this kind of allegory of the Germanic tribe the Batava, but also with that colonial collection, cultivating pineapples in her own greenhouse. And. And as you and probably the the audience of this podcast know, this was also what the Dutch East India Company called Jakarta There was that expansion. And so there's a kind of. Even though there is, we have a coterie of female agents and artists working on the margins or within, creating these kind of heterotopic spaces within this larger society, they're still in some ways entangled in profiting from the colonial model, from the transatlantic slave trade, from expansion into places like Indonesia. And so there are pluses and minuses. But when you have someone like Agnes Bloch fostering and supporting the work of Maria, Isabelle, Marian and her daughters, she did things like commission engravings from a male artist, but she would get Marianne to do the butterflies because she did them better. So again, we have, we have these, these and, and, and, and there's a redeeming of this. I, I did get some pushback from my, from my, from the editors, because I called this, I, I named this, I called this chapter, you know, that they, these women are agents of imitation. They're agents of, they're amateurs. And they all, they both, both Bloch and Marion use the word amateur as a lover of something and in this case a lover of nature. And this is one of the ways in which perhaps there is a tacit need to acknowledge because they're women and working with, not real, they're not the real scientists of the times, that authority is reserved for their male contemporaries and their male counterparts. But there is also, I think we have a. In the 21st century, we have, particularly in models of Eurocentric ideas of creativity, we have an idea that is very much of genius, of originality, that we associate with the kind of 19th century Byronic hero, the Byronic man on his own, delving into the extremes, of experiencing the extremes of emotion and of nature and of even politics in a turbulent larger social context. There is, I think, alternative models are offered in the early modern period. Ideas of imitation as skilled homage, as a contribution, as an exercise of skills and expertise and implementation of craft, craft and of a kind of level of reproduction of art that constitutes an act of art itself. We also have, in one of the other chapters, and I see this also throughout an idea of collective authorship, an idea of a shared commitment to the production of a work of art, of a work of literature. And I see that in the circle around Miriam, I see that in the circle around von Kunsch that I talk about in Acts of Mourning in the first chapter. And I see it as well in the fourth chapter in the Language Societies and the novel produced by Shop Fl.

[D]

Yeah, that's one of the things that I, I kept coming back to while I was reading this is how much, you know, you. You focus on. There is a woman per chapter that you particularly explore. But in context, there's. She has such a big community, such a network, and it's a transnational network of women she's talking to. And so we see this whole community of women interacting, and it really. It's remarkable.

[E]

Right. And there's not a sense of ownership, and there's not necessarily a sense of entitlement, and it is absolutely imperative. And in some instances, there is an involving Of a patroness, usually the wife of the local nobility, of a local monarch, a princess or a mark grafin or a duchess. There is a need for support. There's a need for protection. There is a subtle, A tacit acknowledgment that you have to involve the powers that be to maintain a level of. To carve out that level of that space, to carve out that space in which you can work. And these bonds are forged through work. The kinship beyond immediate bloodlines of the family community that transcends immediate family and geographical location and social justice in ways that we perhaps need to rethink and historicize for this time period.

[D]

Yeah. Okay. So all these stories taken together, what do we know? What does this tell us about early modern women's work? What do we learn? What do we know now that we didn't know 49 minutes ago when we started this?

[E]

This. Other scholars have acknowledged that in the early modern period, pretty much everyone worked men, women, and children above the age of six. But there are different kinds of work. There are different kinds of labor, some of which are captured in the visual arts. Artists by, for example, Cranach and Rembrandt and Durer, depicting everything from mating maids, milking, to women doing their. Their mistress's hair to the representation of courtesans. You know, however, there are women at. In this time period who are engaged actively in optimizing their skills, their training, their intellectual capacities, and their artisanal training to create spaces in which work can take place and it can. In which works that I am including here acts of intellectual labor such as reading and writing and managing an estate and leading religious community, that these women are. Are agents of history in ways that have not yet been acknowledged because of the ways in which we divide labor into productive, manual, skilled labor and intellectual labor and power, and that devolves to gendered labor and reads masculine.

[D]

Fantastic. I think that's probably a great place for us to put a point on this, to bring it to an end. I have so just One more very, very easy question, which is what are you working on now?

[E]

Well, I worked on this book. I had two books in production at the same time. The other one is called German Empires and Decolonial Fantasies 1492-1942. At the same time that I was working on early modern women's work. So after one came out in March and this book came out in April, so I. I took a little bit of a break from. From. From larger. From a larger book project. And right now I am working on a project that I. That I started in. While doing the research for early modern women's work when I was at. At the archive in Herrrenhoek in Germany of the Unity Church. And I came across a letter written by 40 enslaved people, not all of them who had converted to the Unitzkerche. There was proselytizing in the Danish islands of the West Indies at the time, and it was on behalf of 40 enslaved people, written to the king of Denmark about the persecutions that they were suffering as Christians and at the kinds of rights they thought they should have as believers and as faithful members of the church. And I am. It's a paper that I'll be giving at a conference and it is entitled Elective Indenture Whitening Slavery at the Margins of Empire. And I am looking at the voices in that letter that challenge ideas about what was happening in literature, in literature written in German speaking Europe at the time, focusing on, at the time of the transatlantic slave trade, the triangle trade. We have in poetry and in plays and some prose pieces, a focus, a shift of focus away from the enslavement of black Africans to white slavery to the exceptional or this much, much smaller focus on the enslavement of white Christians on the Barbary coast, for example, at a time when that is largely receding and the transatlantic slave trade is escalating. And that is. So I'm looking at these voices from the West Indies and comparing those voices to the kind of representation of white enslavement and black enslavement in one particular play, which is called Weissesklaven in Suriname, the white female slave in Suriname. So it's a little bit of a. It's something I couldn't explore sufficiently in this book. And I'll be presenting that paper at a conference and I hope to work that up into. Take a beat and work on that particular moment in this larger history of the representation of women and of race in the early modern period till about around 1800.

[D]

Wow. Outstanding. That sounds wonderful. I look forward to that work as well. Patricia Ann Simpson, Early Modern work, women's work, kinship, community and social justice. Thank you so much for joining me today. It was an absolute delight.

[E]

Thank you. I really, really enjoyed the conversation. Thank you. Yana.