GEMELA Virtual Book Presentations, 2024:
November 23, 2024
GEMELA Virtual Book Presentations
Saturday, November 23
6:30-8:30am+1 (Melbourne) / 8:30-10:30pm (Madrid) / 2:30-4:30pm (New York) / 11:30-1:30pm (Los Angeles)
Topic: GEMELA NOV 23, 2024 / PRESENTACIÓN DE LIBROS
Time: Nov 23, 2024 02:30 PM Eastern Time (US and Canada)
Join Zoom Meeting
https://wheatoncollege-edu.zoom.us/j/93436381352?pwd=eMFh17caPXLmsfC7xS1wbrUq4zA0sn.1
Meeting ID: 934 3638 1352
*This meeting requires a passcode, which we have distributed via the GEMELA listserv. If you would like the passcode, please email gemelalista@gmail.com
In addition, we will transmit the book presentation live on our Facebook page (GEMELA.grupo)
ORDER OF EVENT (in EST)
2:30-2:35pm Welcome
2:35-3:00pm Anne J. Cruz and Alejandra Franganillo Álvarez, eds.
Early Modern Women’s Mobility, Authority, and Agency Across the Spanish Empire (Amsterdam UP, 2024).
The new parameters of a global world in the early modern period gave rise to an expansion of movement that facilitated spatial and social mobility for women of different social ranks. Through their reexamination of archival documents and travel narratives, these essays investigate the opportunities for female mobility across the Spanish Empire, narrating the journeys of women who assumed new and unpredictable roles in distant environments. Some risked transoceanic journeys to hold positions of colonial power, while nuns traveled to found convents. Portuguese and Genoese women financiers and merchants traversed the Mediterranean to command enterprises in different cities. Breaking with tradition, the noblewomen considered in these essays exercised political agency as ambassadresses and diplomatic spies at various European courts. Still other women fled across borders from oppressive marriages or cross-dressed as soldiers to perform adventurous feats in support of imperial causes. Their frequently distorted histories, authored by men, have been revised and rectified by the authors of this volume.
3:05-3:30pm Emily Colbert Cairns and Nieves Romero-Díaz, eds.
Early Modern Maternities in the Iberian Atlantic (Amsterdam UP, 2024).
Early Modern Maternities in the Iberian Atlantic is the first volume to emphasize women’s personal experiences and their life trajectories as mothers within the Peninsula and across the Atlantic. Although an official discourse that defined the conditions of motherhood emerged in the eighteenth century, before this period there were many different articulations of motherhood through which women negotiated hierarchical relationships, power struggles and alliances. While the individual experiences were unique and depended upon the positionality of race and class, the complexities of being a mother were universal. The wide variety of written and visual documents included in this volume highlight women’s voices in the first person along with more subtle references to motherhood as well as silences. This collection broadens our understanding of the complexities of motherhood, addressing the pressures of becoming a mother, miscarriage, the acts of giving birth and lactation and the ordeals of raising children.
3:35-4:00pm. Cesar D. Favila
Immaculate Sounds: The Musical Lives of Nuns in New Spain (Oxford UP, 2023).
*Winner of the 2024 GEMELA First Book Award*
Immaculate Sounds offers a comprehensive interpretation of the meaning of being a cloistered nun in New Spain, focusing on the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception and nuns’ musical practices. The book emphasizes the idea of cloistered nuns as co-redeemers, interceding for salvation through their singing voices. To support this argument, Favila combines musical fragments, religious and devotional literature, rulebooks of religious orders, ceremonial texts, and visual arts.
4:05-4:30pm Catherine Hall-van den Elsen
Gender and the Woman Artist in Early Modern Iberia (Routledge, 2024)
*Winner of the 2024 GEMELA Book Award*
Through the lenses of gender and class this monograph examines women’s artistic production in Spain and Portugal between 1550 and 1700. Drawing on a broad range of materials including conduct guidebooks, treatises and conventual rules, this book examines the constraints imposed by gender-related social structures through microhistories of nuns, married, and unmarried women. The text spans class boundaries in its analysis of the work of painters, engravers, and sculptors, many of whom have until now eluded scholarly attention in English-language publications. An extensive bibliography promotes new avenues of inquiry into women’s contributions to the visual arts of the period.
GEMELA Virtual Book Presentations, 2023:
Virtual Gemela Symposium 2021
Virtual GEMELA Symposium 2020
