Surveying the absence on her shelf where Elizabethan women’s writing ought to be, Virginia Woolf (in)famously dismissed the possibility of Shakespeare’s sister ever finding “a room of her own” to develop her voice. Recent decades of literary scholarship have shown the invention with which early modern women built out their own textual “rooms,” finding voice in surprising places and forms (even in silence, as Christina Luckyj heard [2002]), in visions of new political subjectivities (in a radically equal imaginary, as seen by Mihiko Suzuki [2003]), and through networks of overlooked community (in coteries and in letters, as traced by James Daybell [2006]). Even more, we have become attuned to the way that early modern women’s texts are not merely “rooms,” blank potentials for an author to inscribe her subjectivity, but rich multivocal chambers whose voices rebound on their author.

We invite proposals for papers to be presented at the Sixteenth Century Society Conference in Toronto, ON, October 31 to November 2, 2024, which pursue questions concerning alternate textual presences in early modern European women’s writing. Often writing from the margins of political or social community, women writers play with absence and desire to invite presence, of all kinds. How do paradoxes of absence/presence and monologue/dialogue manifest in writing by early modern women? How do women writers craft texts which entreat, invite, or summon other presences – be they interlocutors or friends, human or divine?

Suitable topics will focus on early modern (c. 1500-1660) literary texts written by women and might include:

• How presence is summoned/evoked, including in the substitution of objects for subjects

• Substantiation of longing and desire

• Intertextuality and authorial identity

• Anonymity, paratext, and book material culture

• Gaps in the archive

Please send paper abstracts (250w) and brief biographical notes (150w) to Dr. Jantina Ellens jantinaellens@redeemer.ca and Dr. Joel Faber joel.faber@utoronto.ca by Friday, April 12, 2024.