Recent Research on Early Modern Spanish Women Writers: When Actions Speak Louder than Words
Nieves Baranda Leturio, Ph.D.
March 20, 2019
Newberry Library, Towner Fellows’ Lounge, Chicago
Early Modern Spanish women writers have been mainly ignored by literary tradition because their works were not only little known or read, but also because the writers themselves appeared to be isolated from the interests and the literary world of male writers. For the last fifteen years, the Spanish research project, Bibliografía de Escritoras Españolas (BIESES) has been collecting women writer’s works and studying all kinds of documents to understand what the gender gap meant for women in the literary field of the early modern period. Its research has shown that women who wrote desired the same as their male peers, although they concealed their determination to make an
impact under words and concepts that presented them as powerless. The documents and scattered references to their writings discovered by the BIESES project, however, show just how much they were involved in promoting their work, revealing that their actions belied their words.
Nieves Baranda Leturio is Professor of Spanish Literature at the
Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia (UNED), Madrid,
Spain. She currently holds the post of Education Attaché at the
Consulate of Spain, New York. A founding member of BIESES,
she has published extensively on early modern Spanish women
writers.