Teaching Other Voices: Women and Religion in Early Modern Europe

Renaissance Quarterly, Winter, 2007 by Victoria L. Mondelli

Margaret L. King and Albert Rabil, Jr., eds. Teaching Other Voices: Women and Religion in Early Modern Europe.

Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2007. viii 244 pp. index. append. illus. chron. bibl. $21. ISBN: 978-0-226-43632-6.

Commemorating the tenth anniversary of the publication of the first volume of The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe series, editors Margaret L. King and Albert Rabil, Jr., have added a complementary teaching volume for texts dealing with women and religion in the early modern world. In the acknowledgments section, the editors ask for responses from instructors who use the The Other Voice texts as to the utility of the teaching volume so that they can determine if additional teaching volumes would serve well. Undoubtedly, this volume will aid anyone looking to engage students in early modern studies.

The volume begins with a suggested list of multidisciplinary teaching modules and a concise overview of religious history which indicates how Western European women from a variety of socioeconomic backgrounds experienced the tumultuous and reform-minded period from 1350 to 1750. A chronology and framework is included to introduce students to the women's voices that survive in poetry, plays, narratives, letters, autobiographies, records of inquisitorial trials, devotional literature, and so on. The essays present the religious, historical, and literary contexts for the texts and figures discussed, and describe how female figures and their texts can be used in diverse ways. Most valuable to readers will be the pedagogical insights and teaching methods put forth, as they are logical, creative, and student-centered.

The first part, "Italian Holy Women of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries," is composed of two essays: 'Teaching Women's Devotion in Medieval and Early Modern Italy," by Lance Lazar, and "Reading Sister Bartolomea," by Daniel Bornstein. Lazar has given much thought to making devotional literature accessible to undergraduates. The series of questions, potential assignments, and rubrics he offers toward this end can be readily adopted by many courses. Bornstein's essay enumerates smart ways to use Bartolomea Riccoboni's text Life and Death in a Venetian Convent. He shares an example of a writing assignment, lists thought-provoking questions, and shares other ways his colleagues have used the text.

Part 2 investigates "Elite Women of the High Renaissance," with four informative essays: "Teaching Tornabuoni's Troublesome Women," by Jane Tylus, "Antonia Pulci (ca. 1452-1501), the First Published Woman Playwright," by Elissa Weaver, "Vittoria Colonna, Sonnets for Michelangelo," by Abigail Brundin, and "Marguerite de Navarre: Religious Reformist," by Rouben Cholakian. Among other teaching strategies, Tylus shows how one can pair contemporary works of Renaissance art with Tornabuoni's poetry to better understand the portrayal of female figures in the storie sacre. Elissa Weaver's essay, which encourages the use of multimedia and performance, explains how to best introduce theater, literature, and history students to Pulci's sacre rappresentazioni. Brundin discusses introducing Colonna's poetry in a "nuanced and contextualized" (86) fashion, with the necessary historical, religious, and literary backgrounds. In Cholakian's teaching guide, he advises using Le miroir and the Heptameron to explore Marguerite's religious views and the way in which gender and religion inform one another in the texts.

The third part, "Women and the Reformation," includes Mary McKinley's "Marie Dentiere: An Outspoken Reformer Enters the French Literary Canon," Carrie F. Klaus's, "Reading Jeanne de Jussie's Short Chronicle with First-Year Students," and Elsie McKee's, "Teaching Katharina Schutz Zell (1498-1562)." McKinley details how she brings Dentiere's work into the classroom in order to teach, among other things, the reformer's rhetorical strategies. Klaus shares her strategy in pairing Jeanne de Jussie's Short Chronicle with Arcangela Tarabotti's Paternal Tyranny to teach about monasticism and narrative bias. She describes how she uses Dentiere's Epistle as a counterpoint to de Jussie's description of Dentiere, and includes a series of questions for class discussion. McKee's essay on Schutz Zell goes a long way to help instructors choose selections from the corpus of her writings.

The fourth part, "Holy Women in the Age of the Inquisition," includes the following engaging essays: "Francisca de los Apostles: A Visionary Speaks," by Gillian T. W. Ahlgren, "'Mute Tongues Beget Understanding': Recovering the Voice of Maria de San Jose," by Alison Weber, and "Cecilia Ferrazzi and the Pursuit of Sanctity in the Early Modern World," by Elizabeth Horodowich. These essays provide advice on how to use Francisca's trial records, Maria de San Jose's Book for the Hour of Recreation, and Ferrazzi's autobiography in courses aiming to cover the Counter-Reformation, the relationships between women and their confessors, and early modern Catholicism in general.