in The past month of July Carme Font received a good news: the European Research Council had awarded a million and a half euros to feminize the western thought.
During the next five years, this inconspicuous phd in English Philology from the Autonomous University of Barcelona is immersed in a legacy as ignored as impossible: texts written by women between the XV and XVII centuries that are not considered literature or intellectual work. We speak of intimate stories, letters, diaries, poems, and prayers that were the work of women, anonymous, unread or discarded by a style of “non-formal”.
“My goal is not only to retrieve texts written by women from all over Europe,” says Font, “but you know what it is that we say together, interpret them in your community”. Thanks to funding from the European Commission of its project WINK (Women’s Invisible Ink: Trans-Genre Writing and the Gendering of Intellectual Value in Early Modernity), the Font will be able to lead a team of researchers that will track the national archives, public and private libraries in search of these voices, buried.
Portrait of Margaret Cavendish.
Not all started with Jane Austen. Account Carme Font that the women of the SEVENTEENTH century wrote, when they found a moment of peace in the home. “In England and in Germany there was the closet, a kind of small room tiny use female that were in the bedroom. Inside there used to be a reliquary, was thought to pray. Well, many women wrote in there. Valued this time of solitude”. Most of the times the scribes are inspiraba0n in the Bible —his only reading, and his vision of the world— to slide comments and reflections on other matters. It was usual, for example, began by writing phrases religious and ended up taking pests of their husbands, or writing a poem about the fear of disease. According to Font, a recurring theme was the panic towards sex: “it Was traumatic for them. Women went from one pregnancy to the other, and each delivery involved a risk of death. Many wondered how they could scare off her husband in bed”. In more exceptional cases, the ramblings female could be about art, politics and science. In the case of the aristocrat british Margaret Cavendish, who wrote a novel about atoms flying in full SEVENTEENTH century.
from the study of these texts, Carme Font puts in doubt the religious women of those centuries: “Your faith was in the face of the gallery. Their everyday problems did not find the solution in the recitation and not bought the religious discourse, but used it to communicate or to be able to speak in public, as did the prophets of british”. There were also nuns, such as the famous Galerana Baratotti, who questioned the patriarchal order in their texts, as can be read in this excerpt: “My heart has never had the opportunity of becoming annoyed with the sex virile, but when I remember the meaning of the deceptive words uttered by the first of men, was given to her by God as a companion, I can feel a hint of anger” (Semplicita ingannata, 1654).
The majority of the authors of these letters, diaries and poems were not privileged women with access to libraries and teachers of Latin, but those that “knew how to write, and little more.” For this reason, in the opinion of the Font, possess so much vivacity: “they Were texts chaotic and repetitive, but it also had visceral and sophisticated”. As an example, these verses that a Dutch call Anna Bijns wrote in 1524: “well I say that decent men are scarce as the crows white / Renunciad castles in the air that rise up for you / When your tongue has already hunted a bird / goodbye and farewell, love, this fizzles”.
the aim of The research project WINK is to feminize the western epistemology, which its director describes in more simple words such as “stop miss important things”: “throughout history there has been a misogyny textual basis for considering that what the women wrote about their lives was not an object of intellect. This has led to the androcentrismo cognitive. Men and women think masculinamente and we need to realize it.”
Modify the perception
Carme Font aims to change the History books, but is of the opinion that the most important thing is to modify our perception of the intellectual input of women to the civilization: “we do Not value the text a woman about the pains of childbirth but the letter a soldier from the front”.
The researcher will ensure that both for its content as for its form, we usually don’t think that women’s experiences may have value as a thought, and it is certain that you have it: “you Can have the opinion that many of these texts do not say anything extraordinary, that speak of intuitions in time of observations, using the first person instead of a voice falsely objective, but between them there are lines recurring about how women saw the world. We are faced with a body of thought that is not temporary, and that it has a great weight intellectual. To incorporate it into western thought is not a political imposition, but scientific.”
