Researcher plans to shed new light on women writers overlooked for centuries

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They wrote about philosophy. About religion and politics. And about their own lives. But they were women — so hundreds of years ago, their work was dismissed. 

Now, thanks to a $2.3 million grant from the European Research Council, a team of researchers will be scouring libraries and archives across Europe — looking for letters, poems, and other texts written by women in centuries past. 

Carme Font is the lead investigator and a lecturer in English literature at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. Font spoke with As It Happens guest host Helen Mann about the project.

Here is part of their conversation.

Ms. Font, what does it mean to you to have this funding that will allow you to search for this forgotten writing by women?

It's like a dream come true, really, because I have been researching on this text for a number of years, with colleagues around several countries. I have always found it was the right time to put together as many text as possible and study them collectively and see what they tell us as a group.

How much do you know about the women who were doing this writing?

We know a bit on some of them, but we know very little about most of these women. Most of these women we only know their names. We might know their religious affiliation or maybe some particular episode in their lives or who they were married to.

So then what do you glean from their writings in terms of their thoughts, their lifestyles, and who they might have been?

We know that a section of the women that we are studying belonged to what we can name the popular class or middle, lower class. These women were not enjoying full education. They had a very basic education and so they were concerned about issues such as death, love ... caring for the soul. But also they were able to ask bigger questions about the meaning for life, for example.

What compelled you to begin this work? What is it that you were looking for?

I was concerned with the idea that women's writing had always been put in a box, so to speak. In a box that I call "Early Modern Women's Writing." We had looked at these texts very generally, but not really in depth.

And so I was concerned and I was interested in reading those texts individually, paying attention to the style they were written in and being able to extract from them, what I call "intellectual value."

Because most of these texts had contributed ideas which [were] original and warrant some examination. Some of them have to be included in our own history of ideas. So instead of having a separate canon, a separate box for women's writing, we should be able to retrieve some of this writing by women and insert them into the general canon, written both by men and women.

We understand historically that women's writings and women's thoughts would have been considered subordinate. But more recently, why has this writing been overlooked? I would think other historians, other people interested in literature would be pursuing the kind of work you're doing.

I'm actually not the first person to look into these materials. In the last 20 years, there has been an interest in retrieving early modern women's writing. But the originality of this project lays not so much in the fact of retrieving lost materials, but in reading them in a new light.

Of the writings you have examined so far, are things that have stood out for you — things that are particularly memorable or surprising in some of the writing?

Some of these writings are keen on talking about abuse, for example, martial abuse. Some others demonstrate a very keen understanding and search for spiritual meaning in life, such as why we are here, and what is our relationship with divinity?

And so, what struck me as original, is many of these women were convinced that the connection between their life and a spiritual life was very much life for them, and so they had an understanding of spirituality which is very intimate.

Written by Sarah Jackson and John McGill. Interview produced by Sarah Jackson. Q&A has been edited for length and clarity.