Brown Bag Lunch Conversation with Dr Nina Geerdink and Dr Feike Dietz

On Thursday May 27, 2021, Dr Nina Geerdink and Dr Feike Dietz (both Assistant Professors Early Modern Dutch Literature) will present their research project on the gendered conceptualization of knowledge in literary productions of early-modern women (1600-1800).

Female-authored print-publications

This Brown Bag Lunch Conversation centres around women writing and especially publishing literary texts during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. These women did not perform a role that fitted their gender: instead of staying within their private, domestic domains, they participated in a public domain that belonged, at least until the second half of the eighteenth century, primarily to men.

Gendered discourses on authorship

It is for this reason that front matter (the first pages of a publication, such as prefaces, dedications, laudatory poems) in female-authored print-publications is an important source for obtaining insight in gendered discourses on authorship in the early modern period. Whereas male authors obtained authority through the publication of their books, women writers’ authority had to be shaped and defended actively before their publications could be socially and culturally accepted anyway.