Non-Elite Women's Networks Across the Early Modern World / / ed. by Marlee J. Couling, Elizabeth Storr Cohen.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Amsterdam University Press Complete eBook-Package 2023
• HerausgeberIn: Cohen, Elizabeth Storr,; Couling, Marlee J.,
• Place / Publishing House: Amsterdam : : Amsterdam University Press, , [2023]; ©2023
• Year of Publication: 2023
• Language: English
• Series: Gendering the Late Medieval and Early Modern World ; 22
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (258 p.)

Non-elite or marginalized early modern women—among them the poor, migrants, members of religious or ethnic minorities, abused or abandoned wives, servants, and sex workers—have seldom left records of their experiences. Drawing on a variety of sources, including trial records, administrative paperwork, letters, pamphlets, hagiography, and picaresque literature, this volume explores how, as social agents, these doubly invisible women built and used networks and informal alliances to supplement the usual structures of family and community that often let them down. Ten essays, ranging widely in geography from the eastern Mediterranean to colonial Spanish America and in time from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, show how flexible, sometimes ad hoc relationships could provide crucial practical and emotional support for women who faced problems of livelihood, reputation, displacement, and violence.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Table of Contents -- List of Illustrations -- Introduction -- Part I Mediterranean Crossings -- 1. Going Beyond Montagu. The Network of Subaltern Women in the Turkish Embassy, 1716–1718 -- 2. Gendered Naming Practices among Coptic Christians in Sixteenth- Century Cairo. A Preliminary Assessment -- 3. The “Queen of Algiers” An Enterprising Renegade in the Rome of Pope Sixtus V -- 4. An Exotic Migrant , Despina Basaraba Networks a New Life in Papal Rome circa 1600 -- Part II Local Networks in Europe -- 5. Domestic Violence and Networks of Female Support in Seventeenth- Century England -- 6. The Place-Based Networks of Sex Workers in Sixteenth-Century Venice -- 7. Making a Name in Music. Professional and Social Strategies of the Musicians at the Venetian Ospedali Maggiori -- 8. Food and Drink Make Relationships. Female Alliances and Commensality in Celestina and La Lozana andaluza -- Part III Body and Spirit in Colonial Spanish America -- 9. “Wall Neighbors,” Mothers-in-Law, and Comadres. Spousal Violence and Networks of Plebeian Female Intimacy and Solidarity in Urban Neighborhoods of Early to Mid-Colonial New Spain (1550–1670) -- 10. Far from the Margins. Non-elite Single Women and Spiritual Networking in Colonial Guatemala -- Supplementary Bibliography of Secondary Works -- Index