Introduction: International Contexts—National Traditions and Transnational Networks

This introduction offers a brief overview of this section of the encyclopedia. It contemplates the benefits of cross-cultural comparison and transnational approaches to the study of early modern women while also highlighting some of the key insights afforded by the individual entries on countries and regions and on themes such as networks, race, and colonialism. This introduction proposes that, taken together, the entries in this section invite us to contemplate the nature of authorship, questions of periodization, and the cultural climates in which women wrote and produced their work; they ask us to consider how oppressive gender ideologies everywhere affected women’s education and textual agency and how women negotiated obstacles to their authorship.