Jewish merchant woman in Hamburg, Glikl Bas Judah Leib
p. 19 Glikl began to write the book of her life “with an aching heart” after the death of her husnand Haim “to help against the melancholy thoughts which came … during many sleepless nights.”… Hers is the first autobiography from a Jewish woman that we know of … But Glikl never described herself as doing something odd or new, and, indeed, recent scholarship is showing that autobiographies – full or in fragment – were composed by early modern Jews more often than has previously been believed.”
p. 20 Jewish life history was fostered expecially by the centuries-old “ethical will”, an exposition of moral lessons and personal wisdom passed on to one’s children along with instructions for one’s burial and the disposal of ones goods.”
p. 21 “For the Christians, the major model was still Augustine’s confession with a definitive conversion. We see it in the widely read Latin autobiography of Anna Maria van Schurman, Eukleria, published in 1673 in Altona… tells how Schurman renounced worldly fame and the scholarship in languages and secualr literature that she had begun in her native Utrechy and how she embraced a life of humility and religious fellowship with the Labadist sectaries, just then inhabiting Altona. (They were changing their money with the Jews; Glikl and Anna Maria may have passed each other on the street.) A variation on the model is the Leben of the Pietist visionary Johanna Eleonora von Merlau Peterson, published in 1719 when she was 75… describes not a single conversion experience but rather a set of tests, all of which she passed with God’s help”.
Marie Guyart, Marie de l’Incarnation
p. 64 “one of the two women who hounded the first Ursuline convent and school for girls in North America p. 65 “femme forte, a classical and biblical image used by both the literary feminists of 17th-century France, and by the religious, “a femme forte such as Solomon depicted,” her Ursuline sisters said of her after she died.”
p. 65 “born in 1599 in Tours … came from a modest family … father was at best only a ‘merchant baker,’ and it was a step up when he arranged to marry one daughter to a schoolteacher, another to a busy wagoner, and Marie to a silkmaker – a member of the city’s most important industry. … as a teenager she had thought wistfully of the local Benedictine nunnery of Beaumont, where one of her mother’s distant kin was abbess. In fact, that ancient and noble convent would have been unlikely to receive a baker’s daugher as a novice, even if her parents had agreed to a religious vocation”.
p. 128 “As women in Europe, like Maries, expanded their religious voice … so it may be that women in the American woodlands were expanding their voice in religious culture while the men were expanding their political oratory. Conceivably, the role of Amerindian women in dream analysis and soothsaying was not a timeless one, but a response to political changes that began in the 15th-century and were intensified by the arrival of Europeans. Then the women converts that people MArie’s letters, the Hospital records, and the Jesuit Relations – women praying, preaching and teaching – would be an energetic Christian variant on a process also at work in the religion of the okis and the Manitou.
Maria Sibylla Merian
p. 154 “Merian’s … subject was a set of events ,,, and to represent them properly meant crossing the line between orders and putting the plant and animal kingdoms in the same picture. Yet even while lacking the logic of classiciation, her sequence was not “tumultuous”. Emerging, from the sensibility of two artists, Merian and her publisher-husband Graff, the books moved the reader’s eye through the transformations by a visually striking and pleasurable path. The “method” of the Raupen – highly particular pictures and accounts strung together by an aesthetic link – had scientific importance quite apart from the new species contained on its pages. It made the little-studied process of metamorphosis easy to visualize and remember, and insisted on nature’s connections, a long-term contribution. It also fractured older classification systems by its particularism and surprising mixtures, and so cleared the ground for those like Swammerdam who were proposing a replacement.”
p. 155 “Merian was a pioneer, crossing boundaries of education and gender to aquire learning on insects and nurturing daughters as she observed, painted and wrote. Her focus on breeding, habitat and metamorphosis fits nicely with the domestic practice of a 17th-century mother and housewife. We have here not a female mind uneasy with amnalysis or timelessly connected to the organic … but a woman perched for scientific enterpirse on a creative margin – for her a buzzing ecosystem – between domestic workshop and learned academy.”
p. 186 In the Metamorphosis, the Amerindian women themselves identify the abortifacient to Maria Sibylla Meriam: the peacock flower, whose seeds can also speed delivery. Here is a public sharing of the ‘secrets of women’ reported with some symoathy by a Eruopean in whose world abortions were illegal and sinful… (Merian may well have spaced her own children, born in 1668 and 1678, by some form of birth control such as coitus interruptus, but probably not by anortion.) As for her statement that the African slave women did not have children, it is hyperbole, buty it lends support to those historians who explain the low fertility among the slaces as being, in at least small party, a matter of the women’s choice.”
p. 198 “She is 62 years old, but still very lively … and hardworking, a very courteous woman.” Thus Zacharias Conrad von Uffenbach, a learned young scholar from Merian’s birthplace, recorded in his notes in 1711 after visiting the artist-naturalist and buying her books and watercolors. She was now one of the international figures of Amsterdam, a person one had to meet, the way one had to attend Frederick Ruysch’s anatomy lectures, see Nicolas Witsen’s collection, and view the great maps in the Town Hall.”
About