Women Latin Poets: Language, Gender, & Authority from Antiquity to the Eighteenth Century

by Jane Stevenson

Women Latin Poets addresses women's relationship to culture between the first century B.C. and the eighteenth century A.D. by studying women's poetry in Latin. Based entirely on original archival research in twelve countries, Stevenson recovers an aspect of history often deemed not to exist: women who achieved public recognition in their own time, sometimes to a startling extent. Presenting, often for the first time, the work of more than three hundred women Latin poets, all translated and included in a comprehensive finding guide, Women Latin Poets substantially revises received opinion on women's participation in, and relation to, élite culture. The sheer number of female Latin poets will require women's historians to completely re-evaluate the idea that all women had "no access to education" before the nineteenth century.

684 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2005

About the author

Dr. Jane Stevenson (born 1959) is a UK author who was born in London and brought up in London, Beijing and Bonn. She has lectured in history at Sheffield University, and teaches literature and history at the University of Aberdeen. Her fiction books include Several Deceptions, a collection of four novellas; a novel, London Bridges; and the historical trilogy made up of the novels The Winter Queen, The Shadow King, and The Empress of the Last Days. Stevenson lives in Aberdeenshire, Scotland.

Her academic publications include Women Latin Poets (Oxford University Press), Early Modern Women Poets with Peter Davidson (Oxford University Press) and The Closet of Sir Kenelm Digby, co-edited with Peter Davidson (Prospect Books).

Reviews

[Natalie Bennett · Rating 5 out of 5]

Possibly the finest single piece of scholarship I have ever read. Only three decades ago, so distinguished a feminist historian as Gerda Lerner was saying there were no more than 300 learned women up until 1700 in the entire Christian era, suggesting an almost total exclusion from the central language of scholarship through that great arc of history.
Stevenson, however, multiplies that figure by at least a factor of ten, and suggests many avenues of research by which it might be further increased. It forces a rethink about the basic position of women over 1,880 years – in ancient Rome, in the medieval periodand later nunneries, and of the social role of the city’s “showpiece educated woman” across a wide swathe of early modern Europe.
Just imagine the life of Juliana/Julienne Morell (1593-1853), who was writing letters to her Catallan father in Latin at age seven in Barcelona. In Lyon she defended a Latin philosophical thesis in a public audience before Margaret of Austria at the age of about 14.
Particularly look out for Martha Marchina and Willetrudis, in this longer reflection I wrote back when it was published.
And of course Hildegard of Bingen features. I noted too the lovely - if sad - story of rich, aristrocratic poet Sulpicia and her slave Petale.

[K.A. Masters · Rating 3 out of 5]

I desperately wanted to like this book. It is clearly a labor of love, and I am so grateful that the author provided such rich scholarship and research as a foundation for future scholars in the field. That having been said, I am severely disappointed in the book as a whole. I feel like the book is an endless series of missed opportunities. The entire premise of the introduction is that women authors were often unfairly criticized by male scholars for being inadequate, yet it never occurs to the author to include these texts so that we can read and judge them for ourselves. There are 600+ pages of text, but only one or two actual Latin poems per chapter. Most of the Latin passages are men talking about women, instead of the actual women's voices themselves. I feel like this book would have been better in anthology format, allowing the actual women's voices to shine, instead of showcasing what men thought about these author's works.

[Ella · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fine but not fantastic.