Early Modern Women in the Low Countries: Feminizing Sources and Interpretations of the Past

In the first full length, English-language treatment of the topic, this study investigates how late medieval and early modern women of the Low Countries represented themselves through texts, art and material objects, how they were represented by contemporaries, and how they have been represented in modern academic and popular contexts. The text provides an explicitly feminist analysis of two themes: firstly, of similarities and distinctions between female voices about their experiences with the male-authored presentations of them in contemporary sources; and secondly, of the processes that have shaped the memory of late medieval and early modern women's experiences as they are represented in the art, heritage and cultural tourism of the Netherlands and Belgium today. The authors' approach is innovative in the range of materials it exploits for its analysis, from written sources to artworks and material objects. These sources include an elite woman's courtly advice manual and memoire, familial and political letters of young girls and their female care-givers, dolls' houses, female-authored account books, and artwork produced by female artists or commissioned by female patrons. These artifacts are considered in relation to contemporary literature produced by men, especially conduct and later emblem books that proposed models of female behaviour, which were so popular in the Low Countries at this period. A significant aspect of this study is the additional examination of the afterlives of women from the late medieval and early modern period. The authors argue that many of the male-authored sources from that period continue to inform modern presentation of women's experiences by historians, art scholars and tourism providers in ways that deserve closer interrogation by feminist researchers.