Call for Proposals: Early Modern Literatures and Sciences

We are inviting proposals for essays of approximately 6000–6500 words for a collection entitled Early Modern Literatures and Sciences: Forms of knowledge in women’s writing. With this edited collection, we aim to establish the central import of early modern women’s literary work to the history of science archive, and we will ask the authors of each chapter to reflect on how early modern science becomes shaped by literary forms.

Recent scholarship on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century women’s writing has demonstrated the value of women’s labor to early modern scientific developments. Ongoing work on women’s receipt books, for instance, expands our understanding of what counts as the history of science archive and traces the unique knowledge making practices that informed women’s domestic writing. But as the “domestic writing” categorization suggests, this recent work has focused on non-literary genres and tends to keep women’s scientific engagements bounded by household spaces. As a result, we have yet to do justice to the scope and complexity of women writers’ scientific work in early modern England. 

Early Modern Literatures and Sciences will insist that women were doing scientific work in their literary texts and analyze the unexpected forms of scientific engagement embedded in women’s poetry, drama, and prose—forms that shift our perspective on the stakes and scope of early modern literatures and sciences.

The volume will be divided into two sections (Sciences and Genres, both in the plural), and we are asking at this stage not for abstracts, but for a list of keywords that you might be interested in structuring a chapter around. You can find more detail about the volume and the proposal at: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1TMsf-vLxa462VZGfVqDXZZD2Jj14oo3t32Z-2sAOXV4/edit