Contingent Privacies: Knowledge Production and Gender Expectations from 1500 to 1800

This epilogue presents the main insights from Women’s Private Practices of Knowledge Production in Early Modern Europe, demonstrating the key ways in which privacy factored into women’s knowledge-making practices. The chapter highlights women’s strategies of publicizing the private as a knowledge-sharing strategy, the role of the home in knowledge-making in the early modern period, and the limitations and affordances of navigating knowledge-production processes in a female body. Moreover, this contribution emphasizes privacy as a malleable, contingent, and continuous negotiation, not necessarily respected by default, but that enabled women to balance gendered expectations and knowledge pursuits.