Contested Positions: Women Across Early Modern Networks, 1500–1700 (RSA Philadelphia 2027)

Christine de Pizan opens The Book of the City of Ladies answering back directly to Mathéolus and to the Roman de la Rose, texts that cast woman, through the shadow of Eve, as the origin of sin. Against this, Pizan sets her own counter-model of woman as a figure of reason and virtue. That contradiction — sin or virtue, Eve or reason — never fully resolves. It runs through the querelle des femmes across the sixteenth century and into the seventeenth, taken up explicitly by writers such as Marie de Gournay in her Égalité des hommes et des femmes (1622). Paradoxically, in this same period, women such as Marguerite de Navarre in letters and authorship, Sofonisba Anguissola and Judith Leyster in painting, Sophie Elisabeth of Brunswick-Lüneburg in music, Teresa of Ávila within religious and confessional networks, and Catherine de’ Medici and Elizabeth I in political rule were already doing what the querelle was still debating whether women could do.

Taking place within the framework of the RSA 2027 Annual Meeting in Philadelphia, this panel asks how that tension plays out concretely within the epistolary, musical, artistic and confessional networks of the early modern period. Women could act as builders of these networks, as strategic nodes within them, as instruments of surveillance or alliance, or as voices filtered or withheld by those who transmitted them — often several of these at once, within the same relationship.

We welcome papers that reflect on:

•  Letters, and the networks of kinship, alliance, or diplomacy that women built, or were built into, through correspondence
•  Musical and artistic production shaped by comparable dynamics — patronage, dedication, workshop and copying relationships
•  Religious and confessional networks — convents, confessors, institutional hierarchies — where similar structures shaped what a woman could say and who controlled its transmission

This panel is open to scholars at all career stages, from graduate students to senior faculty.

Please send paper abstracts (150 words maximum) and a short CV to Beatrice Mundo (beatrice.mundo11@gc.cuny.edu) and Alessandro Pontelli (pontelli.alessandro@spes.uniud.it) by August 12, 2026.

RSA Philadelphia 2027 will take place March 11–13, 2027, at the Philadelphia Marriott Downtown.

Organizers: Beatrice Mundo (CUNY Graduate Center, beatrice.mundo11@gc.cuny.edu) and Alessandro Pontelli (University of Udine, pontelli.alessandro@spes.uniud.it)