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That's S-P-R-I-N-G-50 at press.prinston.edu. This sale only lasts for a month, so go and get some books. Welcome to the new books network. Hello everybody and welcome back to new books in early modern history, a podcast channel on the new books network.
I'm Elle Smith-Curry, your host today on the channel. This afternoon, we'll be talking to Dr. Jane Stevenson about her new book, Women in Latin, in the Early Modern Period, a wonderful account of what and why women learned Latin in early modern Europe and how that relationship changed over time. Jane, thank you so much for joining us today.
Well, thank you for inviting me. So to get us started, I wondered if you could tell us a little bit more of your own history. Yes, well, I went up to Cambridge in 1978, which was the 300th anniversary of the first one to take a PhD incidentally. But I went to study Anglo-Saxon, norson Celtic.
And when I got there, I sort of lost interest in farewell from starting getting interested in similar Latin. Now, that means that I sort of approached Latin as a post-classical person. And the other thing is that working in that quite obscure and remote field, it became quite clear to me that those matters of stuff that nobody had even edited let alone study properly. It was a field where you sort of took it for granted that you could go to archives and find things.
So when I later started getting interested in women's writing, I thought, well, you just go out and look, you don't take it for granted that nothing's there, just because everybody tells you nothing's there. So I think that's really sort of an important reason of how I got on to all this stuff. Wonderful. I love the idea of going out and looking and finding out what has actually survived, because there's often so much more than we might think.
So that's how you started with Latin. And what kind of brought you to the early modern world? What was it about women and Latin in this particular time period that has caught your interest? Well, when I was in Cambridge, I took Peter Drunkers' course on medieval women, Latinists.
And since I knew how to search archives, I sort of went looking. Well, if there's that much women's activity before 1400, I'd be surprised if it just stopped, even though everybody says, oh, it just stopped. Well, why should it? So I kind of transformed myself gradually from a medievalist to an early modernist, just because you follow the money.
I mean, you follow the stuff that nobody's looked at and nobody knows about. Very good. That's inspiring for us all to go out there and look. And in your book itself, you trace the history of women latinists as much as the historiography of women latinists, which you sort of touched on then, talking about how there's been some study, or there was some study of medieval women in Latin, and then people sort of had this narrative that it just stopped.
So could you give us a little more about that historiography in the past 50 years or so over the course of your career? Yes. Well, I guess in Manuel, who edited, you know, the series edited for this book, asked me if I'd look at the historiography in there. I realized that the key year is 1980.
Sort of before that, there's a blank. And then sort of quite suddenly, there was that particular era of feminism. I was very interested in rediscovery in producing that the Barago press and the women's press and so on. Sort of, you know, the idea of sort of diving into archives and looking for women was very much sort of around in the early 80s.
And then, crucially, in 1983, Margaret King and Alfred Gabriel produce Heramaculate Hand, which is a collection of stuff by Renaissance Italian women. So kind of the life moves on from that. And in 1993, you've got Chicago University Press's The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe, which was dedicated to discovering forgotten writing by women. Credibly useful series.
And if you're interested in English women writers, Betty Trevitsky started putting women latinists in her series, The Early Modern English Women in Print. So, and yeah, another thing, perhaps not so much directly concerned with Latin, but I was concerned with it. They perdated a project which was looking for women's writing in manuscript. I mean, how much of the stuff that nobody knew about.
So yes, I mean, there's just this story of rediscovery sort of from about 1980 to 2000. And since then, mostly we've been sort of chewing it and trying to assess it and see how it changes the picture. Thank you. And I know you've played a large role in that yourself with your other works just bringing to light these women authors who were writing in manuscript and publishing and making that better known to such a broader segment of the population.
Yeah, just to my pro both that I've spent an entire career writing about people that nobody ever heard of. Well, the plus thing is the part I've finished is that they had heard of them. So that was fine, but. Very good.
Well, to turn to the contents of your new book, could you tell us a little bit about women and humanism in Renaissance Italy in particular? So when has the story usually begun? If you look at a typical work on this topic, what date would that kind of relationship start? And what have you found in terms of when learned women actually start appearing in the historical record?
Right. Well, of course, there are no sentences about the discovery of the classics, at which point, it became clear that there were a number of women in the first century BC who left significant reputations as writers. So very likely survives. We've got the poems of Silpica, not much else.
But anyway, the idea of learning four women, I think, partly comes out of the rediscovery of classical Latin. As it happened, if you go to King and Reveal, Herr Mackeland, which I mentioned from 1983, they focus on the mid-15th century generation, which includes women like Alessandro Skala, Isata Nagarola, and Cassandra Federe, the so-called Maiden of Venice. And so what they found, essentially, were a series of women who are writing letters to each other and to men, but mostly letters that you're just saying, I think are wonderful. And Eratians saying, I think so and so is wonderful.
It's quite a dull body of material, to be honest. And so then you get some people like Lisa Jardine sort of coming along looking at this. And so actually, it's a dull body of material. The Renaissance woman is just a sort of ornament to her society.
And they've productive purpose of this. It's somewhere around zero. Well, I was starting from a rather different place. And what I realized is that by the time you get people like Cassandra Federe, popping up, there'd been women studying Latin for, well, there's something in that seriously, in sort of humanist way, for at least a generation, and possibly two.
But very little of what they produce survive, which is why King and Ruby are focused on the people who had left us surviving over. And approaching this as a historian, it struck me that the wives of Condoteeary had to learn how to run a country, because Condoteeary is a professional mercenary, who's also a nobleman. And a Condotee from the beginning of the 15th century would take you away from home running an army on behalf of somebody else for anything up to two years. Now, if you leave your own territories in charge of your brother, let's say you may not get them back.
If you can leave them in charge of your wife, she's the one person whose interest actually marched directly along with yours. She's got the same state you have in handing it on to your common children. So with that in mind, the Condoteary start educating their daughters, they start marrying educated women. In case we're writing a Latin letter of creating a strategy of acting as diplomats, all that kind of stuff.
And because this was an absolutely direct practical use to them. So women's, the first women Latinists in Renaissance Italy are highly functional. Unfortunately, their function was, they were writing letters, but much of what they were achieving was purely oral. The grand sort of diplomatic arts of persuasion.
And so they don't leave a lot of evidence. And I think that's skewed the picture quite markedly. So what we're seeing is really education for political use and oral use more than crafting an artful letter or something like that. And then what happens is that this sort of flows out of the circles where Latin is of utility.
And you start to get the idea of the woman as the ornament of her society. So Cassandra Federe is addressed as Odeku Sitalievio, Virgin, the glory of Italy. And a learning lady is a sort of totem, bigger for her society. And that's a kind of secondary development as far as I see.
Interesting. So how do you think that these earlier women, these women coming out of their conductory household, who are Latin, how do you think they change the way that we look at the more famous female humanists of 15th century Italian Renaissance? Well, I think you have to, you have to nuance. They sort of lead a journey into an argument that Latin for women was always useless.
And so actually, there are people who Latin is really useful. And what I find, if you really sort of drill down, is that the sort of noble families I'm talking about go on educating their daughters for generations. So in the 16th century, Victoria Goulon has the most famous poet in Italy. Much published, she's a friend of Michelangelo, she's a very sort of high profile figure.
She's six generations down from Isortonogorola in direct descent, every single generation between Isortonogorola and Colona. You have educated Latin literary women. So you get these sort of family traditions where they just go on doing it. And the purpose is for which it is used, of course, changes with society more generally.
Yeah, thinking about society in general and the reception of these Latin women in their own era, how did contemporary humanists like Leonardo Bruni or Martino Filippico respond to these women? Do we see pushback? Do we see praise? What's the response there?
Praise and welcome. There ought to be more of this. And so Bruni writes that the first treat is on why women ought to be educated. And Filippico writes a work which is effectively in praise of Batista, the de D'Amontrofaltro, the wife of the great failure ego.
Well, humanists are partly doing this because they're strongly in favor of being more jobs for humanists. Ah, yeah. So they will argue for more and better education at the drop. I mean, they don't argue for educating donkeys.
If they thought donkeys were capable of paying them. So the thing is that education is excellent. Education makes you more excellent in yourself. This is an absolutely key humanist, Tina.
But what it's trying to do is to ensure that more and more and more people with money are prepared to take a humanist into their household. So educating women is risk to the mill. Very good. You can't think of a single humanist who says otherwise.
When it comes to money, I suppose they will do whatever it takes to get a job. Well, it's a highly competitive. Yes. Any humanist, they want to get a university position.
They want to be great man's secretary. So they spend an awful lot of time just sort of oiling around anybody with money. And so promoting education for women is I think it's part of that package. So that's the Italian context.
Over in France, what or rather who do we see? What women do we see receiving a humanist education? And what seem to be their parents' motivations if we don't necessarily have that same conditary setup politically speaking in France? Well, it absolutely starts with the court.
And generally speaking, the Italian Renaissance provides a sort of pattern, which the rest of Europe finds powerfully interesting and attractive. The new learning spreads out of Italy and carries with it ideas about mathematics and perspective and the Lord knows what. But also carries with it just as part of the package, the idea that women should be educated. Now, in French context, the first women who do this and who get, find themselves a humanist and start learning are really the royal family.
And they do it for the same reason that Bhattis de Montfaltreau did because they might end up in charge. And for instance, from François-Permier is imprisoned in Italy for a number of years. So somebody has to act as his regent. And that somebody has almost invariably female.
So you find that as the 15th century to where it's to an n16th century begins, women are occupying these sort of diplomatic roles, where a commander of this way is of language is really useful to them. But they're only at this very top level of society. Yes. So again, I'd say it is fundamentally practical.
Staying at that top level of society, could you take us to England and talk through just, I'm sure many people are familiar with the ups and downs of Tudor monarchs, but how those particular royals really impacted women's education more broadly beyond just Elizabeth and Mary receiving Latin educations? How did the makeup of the royal court opportunities for women's learn Latin? Yeah, well, Henry VIII, I mean, he's very impressed by what's going on in France. So his court starts to become more humanist, and of course, he marries Catherine of Aragon, who was a highly educated Spanish princess.
And after the arrival of Catherine of Aragon, Mary Tudor, that is to say Henry's sister, not his daughter, she starts to learn Latin in about 1520, because she can see the fashion has changed, and she does in fact briefly become Queen of France. So despite the fact that obviously Catherine ends up exiled and separated, she's brought with her a new sophistication in women's culture. So that remains the case. So Henry's last wife, Catherine Parr, I mean, was an educated woman, and she oversees the education of her grandchildren.
Two short reigns, of course, Edward and Mary Tudor, they continue to be sort of humanistically directed. I mean, you can't say that Edward VI, he was only a young boy, he had much to do with women, Latinists, but his uncle, Seymour, who was the Lord Protector of England effectively regent, he educated his three youngest daughters up to the nines, and they published a book of verse, the Latin verse in Paris. So it's still obviously central to the culture. And Mary Tudor is the patron of Mary Bassett, who's the daughter of Margaret Roper, daughter of St.
Thomas Moore, so she is producing a culture that's fostering towards women Latinists. And then of course, by the time you get to Elizabeth, you have this assumption that that in education, knowing who lived here is all this stuff, is part of throneworthiness. Anybody who's remotely likely to get near the throne or even marry a king is going to have a full feminist education. Unfortunately, of course that changes under James, who has no interest in learning women, what's the weapon fact, he has no interest in women.
So you see a marked difference by in the reign of James, learning ladies who are not welcome at court. In fact, they continue to be learning ladies, but they're not occupying these sort of high profile positions, not least of course, because Latin is ceasing to be the principal diplomatic language. I mean, the education for a woman court here in the 17th century is based in French, French is the fashionable language. So this relates not just to rulers personalities, but also to the place of Latin in the culture more generally.
Fascinating, the way that things can change and circumstances and people and style all impact this larger narrative. So that was France and England. You argued at Spain in Portugal, well, not argue, I'm sure you found in your research that Spain in Portugal have produced fewer learned women than other areas of Europe. And I wonder if you could talk about some of the factors that might have contributed to this lower amount of Latin women.
Well, I think it's actually to do with the competing attraction of religion. Spain is the motor of the counter-reformation, I mean, think of Philip II. And where the really sort of clever and interesting dynamic women go is into the church. I mean, think of Theresa Vavila.
She's writing very powerfully in Spanish. But what women of real sort of capacity do is become nuns. They become mystics in the case of Jane Mary of Agrada. And she's the principal political advisor to Philip III.
But she's a nun. And she's not a humanist. And by this, it's a differently shaped culture in where humanism in general has less weight than it does in France or Italy. And at this point in comments in the ABIR in peninsula had Latin lost its usefulness.
I know at least in the medieval era, we think of comments as this great resource for women's Latin access. But is that no longer the case by the 16th century? Well, women have to understand enough about Latin to perform the liturgy because, of course, the Eucharist and so on. Those services are all in Latin.
But their own writing, which is often extensive, I don't know of any piberian convent, which is any kind of a center of Latin learning. They're not even translating from Latin. So there's a few learning ladies knocking around the Spanish and Portuguese courts. But the culture as a whole just doesn't seem to find much of a place for these women.
Interesting. So we've been talking about women in courts at this highest level of society. But you also bring our attention to the fact that educated women in the 16th century begin to use their Latin professionally. That is as part of wage to labor.
So could you talk more about what causes this development and what sort of work we find Latin women engaging in this era? Yes, well, I think the two principal areas where you find learned women engaged in work, it's teaching and printing. Because teaching is obvious. One niche which develops, of course, is the woman teacher of some high-born goal or goals, where might be considered safer, since the unit could be abandoned as an institution.
If your poor precious infanta is educated by another woman, like Louisa Seger, who is educating the infanta Maria, rather than interesting her to a male cuto, which could cause all kinds of trouble. So women start turning up as educators or helping their father's, humanist fathers, run a school or sometimes even oking a school of their own. And as far as printing goes, well, the great majority of what's printed in the 16th century is, of course, in Latin. And hand-pressed book printing is incredibly labor intensive.
You know, printers marry the daughters of printers, because your wife needed to be able to sort of multitask, to mind the baby and serve the porridge and type set a page, or all as part of the same day's work. So printers become a kind of clan. And it's assumed that women should be able to take up this lack. And you can't really type set a page if you don't understand anything about what's on it, because you've got to be able to read the manuscripts that you're setting from.
So you can almost think of them as, yes, learning women in sort of many corners of Europe. Wonderful. So sticking with those printers for a second, they're almost like modern copy editors, to some degree, where they need to be able to tell if the sentences make sense and the words are correct, and that would require having knowledge. If you think of it, somebody is sitting there with a manuscript, not every human is had a beautiful metallic hand by any means.
And they were also prone to using abbreviations. So you've got to be able to sort of look at what's in front of you and translate it. And you can't do that unless you recognise the DNS is short for dominoes. So, yes, I mean, without Latin, you probably are going to make a big mess of things.
Fascinating. So this has all been mostly focused on the 16th century, but you have encouraged scholars to look to the 17th century as well. You note that there's a general assumption that women Latinists kind of disappear after 1600. But you argue instead that, quote, throughout Europe, there are more women using Latin in the 17th than in the 16th century.
And they do so for a wider range of purposes, end quote. Could you tell us a little bit about why we have failed to notice these 17th century women? Well, yes, I think there's several reasons. One is about the general shape of culture.
And after 1600, Europe's vernaculars are the principal means of literary expression in almost every country. Latin is increasingly the preserve of universities, law, and medicine. Great masculine bastions that don't emit women. So the assumption is obviously women aren't going to do that in Latin.
Also, think about the rise of the novel. There is an absolutely gigantic rise in the number and variety and interest of works also by women after 1600, but in Europe's many vernaculars. So I think that's part of the answer in a sort of assumption that Latin doesn't really matter anymore. And if you want to work on women, you know, go off and work on Afro-Bain or somebody like that.
And so it's a combination of what women are doing, what most women are doing. And an assumption that Latin's just become as sort of out-to-mode bastion of certain professions. And people just stop looking. You can do so make interesting things about women's writing.
And so why do you look at needles and haystacks? I think it really sort of pretty much comes down to that. Well, it's encouraging for younger scholars to know that there's lots more out there to go look for. Sticking with the 17th century and this shift in attitudes and values, could you tell us a little bit about how the figure of the female prodigy, who you brought up earlier in our discussion of the Italian humanists, how this attitude changes in the 17th century, particularly amongst learned women themselves, these women who perhaps earlier would have been held up as the emblem for their city.
How are they viewing themselves or presenting themselves in this language of prodigy? Well, curiously, the woman prodigy as a phenomenon continues quite merrily through the 17th century. And because the Stuart court isn't that sort of place, you just don't, it's not a phenomenon of the English world so much. And I must say the English-speaking academy does tend to prefer looking at things in England by and large.
So Bathua Macon, who later became a schoolmistress, turned up at the Stuart court as saying, presented as a learned mate who could read and write sort of Greek and Hebrew and Latin and all the rest of it. And the king just looked at her and said, but can she spin? So you can't be a high-profile woman prodigy in England. They just isn't a niche.
On the other hand, Annemarie Van Rommen in Utrecht is probably the single most famous woman in the country. It's still happening in Italy. Elena Piscopio, who's the first person to take a PhD, she does in 1678, again, very high-profile figure. So Rowanna Maria De La Cruz in Mexico is another of these sort of prodigious ladies.
And one thing that you really notice is that they are regarded as cultural capital, that although education for women is not greatly encouraged in the Dutch Republic, they're Johnny Proud of Annemarie Van Rommen. But you also find that the women who have something of this prodigy status very much take notice of each other. So Annemarie is sort of writing letters and poems and encouragement to people like Marie de Gournet in France. The editor thought, who's translating Seneca in Denmark, they're congratulating each other.
So there's very much a network as communications in the 17th century are much better. So they're writing letters to each other all over Europe. And in the case of Rowanna De La Cruz, I mean, you can be on Europe. So this is expansion of women and networks and communication that's ongoing.
So one of those women in the 17th century, who you bring our attention to, is Martha Markeena in Italy. And I am personally a big fan of her poetry. So I was wondering if you could introduce our listeners to her as well and talk about how her life really highlights some of the major arguments of your book as we expand our study of women and Latin beyond just the well-known figures of the 15th and 16th centuries. Yeah.
Well, the interesting thing about Martha Markeena is that she doesn't fit with the pattern woman Latinist of the 17th century. She's not a totem to her city, which is Rome. She's not occupying a public high profile place. She's not a member of academies.
All of the things, she's not writing letters to other women, all of the things I was just talking about is the typical learned phenomenon or woman of that time. She's working class. And she's effectively an autodidact. Her mother died when she was seven.
And her father, who was made so console brooms, so that there's an artisan level of society, he can't afford anybody to look after his two boys. So, she tells Martha Markeena to bring up her brothers. The brothers are sent to the oratory, the Chiesenuva, which was probably the nearest church to where they lived. It's certainly very near where we know the Markeena shop was.
And the oratory were a new order who specialised in the care of the urban poor, and oratorians took on charitable projects. So one of the oratorian fathers takes an interest in the boys and starts educating them. And when they go home to their sister, she basically refuses to feed them until they've discovered what they learned that day. So she learns Latin kind of secondhand.
And the headmaster, and Ludo Vico Santavino, he calls on Markeena's father and sort of says, you know, your sons are beginning to interest me, because of course by the time they've explained everything to Martha, I mean, they must have been phenomenally well prepared for school boys. And they had to, I mean, they were effectively learning and teaching at the same time. So, you know, my guess is, I'm thinking that these kids are so committed to learning. I wonder if we might be sponsoring them into a seminary to become priests, in terms of major form of upward mobility in 1770 Rome.
Anyway, Markeena says, well, I don't know anything about that. You'll have to ask Martha at which point, something to discover that Martha is sitting at home desperate for books, learning as much Latin as she possibly can. And in fact, the oratorians take her under their wing. They start ending her books.
They help her with her education. They try without success to think of something, something to do with her. Does she want to run the school? No, she doesn't.
Does she want to become a nun? No, she doesn't. Does she want a university chair? No, she really doesn't.
Again, it would be horribly exposed. So, you know, she's socially quite beyond her. So basically, she doesn't marry. Her own profession is as a gold embroiderer, for which there was a tremendous ready market in 17th century Rome, you know, making beautiful things for the altar, you know, chalice fails, all that sort of stuff.
And so she sits in the attic, embroidering with gold, and thinking about, well, picking a subject for meditation while she serves. And I think she's sort of stitching and thinking. And reduces these short, intense, reflective religious poems, you know, based on her morning's meditation, I mean, puts her embroidery down, picks up a pen and writes it down, you know, once it's clear in her mind. And so she's taken under the wing of these sparders, who are themselves a family that's sort of risen from nowhere, from little place called Britigella.
And so by the time Martha Marquino traps their attentions, there's a spider who's become a cardinal, and there are several more cardinals in the family. And the work that we have of Marquinos is essentially preserved by these spiders, which is a partition of theirs. She dies very young at 43 of a fever, but then in somebody's entry, Rome people did, because, you know, fever was endemic, and you just caught typhus off the timer. But she was much respected, she was taken completely seriously as a poet, and, you know, she had her own little social niche, which was essentially with cultivated churchmen.
So very peculiar story, not what anybody's expecting at all, but she is a very good poet. Yeah, I would encourage anyone who's interested to look at her poems. We're talking right now in the Build Up to Christmas, and she has some lovely ones that have that meditative effect that you were discussing. She just returns to those themes again and again.
So Martha Marquino, 17th century, women in Latin, changing the way that we have often thought about it. But your book doesn't limit itself to the 17th century, and you write about women in the 18th and 19th century, and again, just this flourishing of women Latinists. Could you tell us a little bit about what the relationship between women in Latin looks like in these latter two centuries? Yes, well, I think by the time you get to the 18th century, women are learning Latin because they really want to.
You get some people like Say Lady Mary Workley Montague, a famously inquiring mind, you know, one of the people who introduced vaccination to Europe, you know, interesting, interested person. Well, by the time she's 11, she's rummaging around in her father's library teaching us all Latin, so that's the sort of person who decides they want to learn Latin. And one very interesting development of the 18th century is that women start learning Latin or teaching themselves Latin because they're interested in science. So you get women astronomers, you start getting women doctors, or you get women mathematicians.
There's a number of women, most notably the Marquis de Chatelet, who's a particular friend of Voltaire's. Marquis de Chatelet produces the standard translation into French of Newton's pre-GPR, very difficult text. There's several women who are extremely interested in Newton, you know, in the, what's that, the sort of cutting edge physics of the 17th century. So, yeah, I mean, there are contexts like, you know, botany, then you know, these new sciences where women are, so just so intellectually attracted and that in this means to an end.
And you start getting women knocking on the doors of the professions. There's a woman in Germany who persuades Peter the Great to let her join the medical school at Hallo, so that's a special dispensation. And in order to do so, she has to be able to write and defend a Latin thesis, which she does. But another thing you get, which really comes out of this sort of salon culture of 17th century France, is that women start taking up places as public intellectuals.
And I think you have people like, you know, Hanumor or Madame Lafayette. If you sort of drool down into their past, you're very often fined, they were Latin literate, that their appearances, you know, public figures of writing published essays or whatever it is, is based or, you know, buttressed by the fact that they're thoroughly educated. So, you know, in the 19th century, I'd point to George Eliot, deeply famous, or obviously as a novelist, started by, you know, starting every university English department in the world. But, you know, students of George Eliot aren't necessarily even told that when she was still a young one called Marian Evans, she was translating the philosopher Baruch Spinoza.
Again, you know, very difficult work in Latin. So, yes, I mean, women are using Latin as a means to an end. They want some kind of a public position, you know, as an essayist or somebody that's come to for opinion. Or they want to enter a profession, or they want to study physics, you know, that sort of reason.
And if you do want to study physics or something, it's, you learn that in, that's taken totally for granted. So, nobody ever mentions it. So, women Latinists are still here, still there, and doing interesting things, even if it's different than... Yeah, I'd go back there in the 19th century, the university started opening to women.
So, you know, classics departments start acquiring women, and there is, since then, you know, a legion of women have to distinguish work or nothing. Well, as a senior scholar in the field, what are your hopes for the study of Latin women going forward? I could answer that in one word, editing. Two words, I'm translating.
But, you know, when I was working on a book I wrote many years ago, Women Latin Poets, I found I was drowning in women Latin, so I couldn't stop. You know, I was trying to produce an overview, but I kept coming across some, you know, sizeable and interesting literary production, thinking somebody must edit them, you know, why has nobody edited Willa Trudis, who was a 12th century English abbess, who wrote one of the most feminist works of the 12th century, which is a long poem about Susanna and the Elders. You know, it's a completely counter-cultural document, you know, and that's never been edited. You know, there's miles of stuff that nobody's looked at.
You're saying Mark Marquina, I mean, really interesting poet, really interesting life, and, you know, people are starting to look at Marquina, but there is not, at the moment, an addition with facing page translation, and one is desperately needed. So, yes, I mean, you know, picking author and doing something about her is what I would advise any younger woman who wants to get into working on women latinists. Well, encouraging words for those listening who are interested. Jane, it's really been lovely talking with you today.
A final question before we sign off is, how has your work on women in the early modern period led you in new directions for research, or are you yourself taking up the editing and translating task? What's on the horizon for you these days? Well, I mean, actually in rather different directions, in 2000, I moved to Aberdeen, where I was Regis Chair, and I'm now in Oxford, but I got, I mean, Aberdeen is a very interesting place, and I got very interested in Scottish Latin literature, and the distinctiveness of the Scottish literary tradition, and so since doing all this stuff like women latinists, I've also done a lot about, you know, the humanist culture of Scotland, and another area that I got into was Recisence. I was interested in exiles, and so I've been doing a lot of work on the sort of Catholic counterculture of the early modern, and in particular, on the interior lives of women in one way or another.
So, yeah, kind of one thing leads to another, but it doesn't necessarily kind of lead to the next step on the path with women in Latin, you know, just all weaves in and out, basically. Well, I look forward to reading whatever you produce next, and learning more from you about what you discover. Again, thank you so much, Jane, for being on the show today. I really enjoyed our conversation.
And to our audience, thank you for joining us for this discussion of Women and Latin in the Early Modern Period by Jane Stevenson. I've been your host, Elle Smith-Curry, and you've been listening to new books in early modern history. Take care.