The Intellectual History Working Group hosts a session with Elise Watson.
The invisibility of sources relating to the lives of early modern women is a point frequently lamented by scholars of gender. At first glance, this seems to be true in the case of ‘spiritual daughters’, as Catholic lay sisters in the early modern Dutch Republic called themselves. Marginalised for their faith and their gender in a Reformed society, these women seemed to live quiet and inauspicious lives, evidenced by reports from their ecclesiastical superiors and local ministers. However, a deeper look into surviving printed ephemera and manuscript sources reveals active and flourishing communities of spiritual daughters, built through creating, buying and sharing devotional books and single-sheet prints. This presentation will argue that while the invisibility afforded by their gender and religious status enhanced their access to religious print, this print allows them to be remarkably visible to us today.
Elise Watson is a postdoctoral researcher for the Universal Short Title Catalogue project, where she works on early modern France and the Low Countries. Her PhD, completed in 2022, focused on the clandestine Catholic book trade in the Dutch Republic, examining how the availability of print shaped minority religious experience. She is currently editing a volume in Brill’s Library of the Written Word series on gender and book history.
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