The historian’s decision to write about one facet of human experience and not another gives that aspect permanence and significance. For history represents a people’s, a society’s, a culture’s way of remembering itself.
Judith P. Zinsser, History and Feminism: A Glass Half Full (Twayne, 1993), 117.
This conference aims to explore women’s historical writing produced between the sixteenth and mid-eighteenth centuries. While Catherine Sawbridge Macaulay’s eight-volume History of England (1763-83) is sometimes seen to mark the beginning of women’s contributions to ‘mainstream’ historical thought within Britain, women steadily engaged with historical writing throughout early modernity – both within the British Isles and beyond – producing a diverse range of texts that contributed in significant ways to the period’s historical culture. Clio Reframed seeks to reinvigorate critical approaches to these works and to explore the hybridity of early modern historical writing, which, in the absence of fixed disciplinary methods, could encompass material that we no longer recognize as historical (such as legendary narratives about a nation’s origins) and different approaches and forms, including chronicle histories, verse narratives, drama, pamphlets, memoirs, historical lives, and treatises. As Judith Zinsser suggests, the work of historians – then and now – is not an impartial act, but a process of giving ‘permanence and significance’ to certain aspects of human experience, of demonstrating what matters to an individual, a society, or a culture through the histories that are valued and how they are studied.
Clio Reframed seeks to explore the diversity and heterogeneity of early modern women’s historical writing. It does not aim to homogenize women’s writing through an emphasis on their gender as an essentialist or universalizing identity vector that overlooks differences in social background, religion, race, sexuality, and political views. Rather, the conference aims to foreground these distinctions and negotiations and to position women’s writing within broader political, religious, and textual networks involving other authors, patrons, stationers, and readers. Anne Dowriche’s French Historie (1589), a verse narrative about the persecution of Huguenots, should be understood alongside other writings on the French Wars of Religion and within the local networks of writers and stationers with whom Dowriche associated. Other women wrote from positions of social, religious, or gender exclusion that reveal how the past could be used to understand and record these experiences: Catholic exiles in European convents wrote histories of their lives and communities – such the Chronicle of St Monica’s in Louvain, which interweaves Elizabeth Shirley’s Life of Margaret Clement and anonymous continuations by other nuns that recount the history of the convent, blending elements of biography and chronicle history. Sarah Cowper’s extensive manuscripts recount personal, contemporary, and world history, her engagement with the past in part an effort to escape from an unhappy marriage and ‘to live more by memory than by hope’ (1706-09: IV, 106). The diverse range of works and authors – from royal and noble writers (such as Margaret Cavendish and Marguerite de Navarre) to prominent gentlewomen (Anne Fanshawe and Margaret Cunningham) and the middling sort (including Cowper, born to a London merchant, and Katherine Ross, born to a Scottish minister) – reveal a vibrant cross-section of authorial backgrounds, literary genres, and historical subjects. Beyond the confines of mainstream political or national histories, these texts reveal alternative views about community and belonging, often displaying an interest in transnational identities in response to experiences of religious and political exclusion and moving easily across these boundaries.
Clio Reframed will take place on 18th and 19th June 2026 at Corpus Christi College, University of Oxford and feature plenary lectures from Danielle Clarke (University College Dublin), Claire Gheeraert-Graffeuille (Université de Rouen Normandie), Emilie Murphy (University of York), and Sue Wiseman (Birkbeck, University of London).
The conference welcomes global perspectives, cross-disciplinary approaches, and the discussion of texts written in languages other than English.
Clio Reframed is generously supported by Corpus Christi College, Oxford’s Centre for Early Modern Studies, and the Society for Renaissance Studies
