Women and Their Worlds

“Engaging the intersecting fields of early modern travel, travel writing, and women’s history from a global perspective, this collection brings to the fore the multivalent political, social, and linguistic ‘worlds’ that women from Europe, the Americas, and Asia navigated from the sixteenth through the eighteenth century. Its nine chapters adduce documentary, literary, and visual sources in multiple languages across geographies and genres to advance our understanding of how these worlds shaped early modern women and how early modern women shaped these worlds.” -Bernadette Andrea, co-editor, Travel and Travail: Early Modern Women, English Drama, and the Wider World “This enthralling collection of essays expands our knowledge of the cartographic turn in early modern Europe by advancing the multicultural, multiethnic, and gendered dimensions of travel writing across the known western and eastern worlds. The essays demonstrate how both men and women wrote about their own experiences and on what seemed foreign or exotic to them. The collection’s keen analyses offer us a new and revelatory view of the complex and contradictory ways of seeing women in early modern travel writing." -Anne J. Cruz, co-editor, Early Modern Women's Mobility, Authority, and Agency Across the Spanish Empire This volume, the first of its kind, investigates the representation of women in the travel accounts of European travellers from the Age of Exploration until the Grand Tour across different cultural traditions, both European and non-European. It brings together, in a new perspective, travel writing, women’s history, and gender studies, offering a systematic and comparative approach to a subject that has not yet received the scholarly attention it deserves. Helena Sanson is Professor of Italian, History of Linguistics and Women’s Studies at the University of Cambridge, UK. Malgorzata Trzeciak-Cygan is Assistant Professor of Italian Literature in the Faculty of Applied Linguistics, University of Warsaw, Poland.