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Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal (EMWJ) invites submissions to an interdisciplinary Forum on Early Modern Women and Memory, slated for publication in Volume 6 (2011). What is the relationship between women and memory? Are there gendered ways of remembering and forgetting the past? How were women’s memories represented in early modern culture by men and by women? Which aspects of women’s history have not been remembered? How did members of different religions, classes, and ethnicities shape both their own individual memories and also cultural memory? How does the gendered experience of their religious customs influence the relations of women and memory? How did women’s material culture – their writings or their commissions for tombs – produce public and private memory? Which memory guides did women use? Which memories were privileged? Did women have special, perhaps secret, places – lockets, combs, cabinets, receipt collections– where they kept memories of past events, relationships, or even religious experiences? Do different genres - autobiography, portraiture, and chronicles, among others – secure different types of memory? Did women record false memories? Do their memories conflict with those of others? What were the perils for women of looking back? Did early modern memories differ from medieval or modern ones? Were early modern memories fragmentary, like collages? Did they conform to certain preexisting genres? How have modern scholars dealt with the memories of early modern women?
We invite submissions that address these issues, structured in the form of a brief essay. Forum contributions should not exceed 1300-1500 words for the body of the text (and should not exceed 2500 words with footnotes). Please refer to the Journal’s style guide (see submissions page) for the correct footnote form. We accept analyses in all disciplines, but those with an innovative approach that cross disciplines and national borders are especially welcome. Editors will accept submissions as e-mail attachments to emwjournal@umd.edu . The deadline for Forum submissions is September 24, 2010.