Women’s Writing in the Context of Their Lives, 1520–1720

Summary

Far Fewer Women than Men Were writing in early modern Germany and many of them remain unknown. New discoveries continually add fresh details to our view of the literary landscape — an example is the recent discovery of work by Anna Köferl. The only information we have about her is on the 1631 Nuremberg broadsheet describing the large “dolls’ house” that she commissioned and then furnished over many years. Her verses appear under a woodcut by her husband, Hans Köferl, depicting the exterior of the house. She tells us its size — nine feet high, five wide, four deep — and how she fitted it out with furniture, bed linen, and kitchen utensils, even with an armory, paintings, and a library. She claims to have put the leisure due to her childlessness to good use, furnishing the house to show young people how to order and equip their own eventual homes, and invites those who have not yet seen it to come and do so. As a woman writing in the early modern period, Köferl is unique in her choice of topic and highly unusual in belonging to the artisan class. Nevertheless, her dolls’ house fascinatingly mirrors the full-scale building projects of noblewomen who were patrons of the arts or who collected libraries, and her verses have features in common with other women’s writing: a religious context (she sees her childlessness as God’s will), dependence on leisure and male cooperation, didactic purpose, and a sharp focus on domestic life.

Research over the last sixty years has identified these general characteristics of early modern women’s writing. In 1943 Lotte Traeger compiled a systematic list of sixteenth-century sources; in 1984 Jean M. Woods and Maria Fürstenwald published a bio-bibliographical lexicon of seventeenth- and earlyeighteenth- century women writers, artists, and scholars; in the late 1980s, drawing to a large extent on these sources, Barbara Becker-Cantarino and Gisela Brinker-Gabler published historical surveys of early modern women’s writing. Since then, numerous studies and modern editions of work by women have appeared, but research progresses slowly, often bedeviled by the difficulty of tracing women’s texts and the details of their lives.