Spanish Academic Wins EU Grant To Unearth Early Women Writings

Carme Font, a lecturer in English literature at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, has been awarded 1.5 million euros (approximately, US$1.7 million) by the European Union to unearth women’s writings from the year 1500 to 1780.

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The five-year-long project, called “Women’s Invisible Ink: Trans-Genre Writing and the Gendering of Intellectual Value in Early Modernity,” will see her rescuing works of women writers from the margins of European thought and give these early female writers their due recognition.

“These were women without formal education,” she said. “They wrote popular texts and letters about religion and politics. Their texts are less sophisticated and aren’t the work of famous female writers, but these are the ones we’re rediscovering.”

These women wrote about a lot more than just religion or politics.

“There are everyday texts, about family problems, marital problems, sexual issues and abuse, and about their personal frustrations,” said Font.

“I don’t want to suggest that these women were just protesting or complaining – there are a lot of women who were writing about subjects that interested them: about politics and current affairs.”

Her other goal is to also destroy the idea that the women in the early modern period were passive individuals or just intellectual bystanders without any agency.

“What they wrote was seen as minor, as being a mere repetition of what men had written. Because a lot of these women never had a formal education, they wrote in a more informal way. They weren’t following a formal essay style and they were criticized for that and told, ‘No, your writing isn’t proper; you don’t respect the flow of cause and effect’, and so on. That’s how their writings came to be marginalized,” explained the academic.

She also explained that this project is not just about remembering forgotten female thinkers. It is about changing the perception of early women’s writings both in regards to literary style and the contents.

“It’s about evening out our perceptions and acknowledging that even if women wrote in a different way, their ideas possess an intellectual value,” she said. “We need to change the way we read those texts and give them their just values.”