Enfilade

From Bloomsbury:

Brianna Robertson-Kirkland and Louise Duckling, eds., Women and Transnational Cultural Exchange, 1550–1850 (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2026), 256 pages, ISBN: 978-1350512283, $115.

Focusing on the international circulation of culture and ideas by women in the early modern period through the long eighteenth century, this book amplifies their presence in history, finding new ways to explore their transnational encounters and exchanges. Providing a rich introduction to the topic of women’s transnational interactions, the essays build a diverse picture of female engagement with the wider world and consider how women interpreted, influenced, or transferred culture and ideas around the globe. Examining figures such as Aphra Behn, Charlotte Bonaparte, and Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy, this book looks at novels, memoirs, poetry, translations, travel writing, and plays, as well as considering the ways in which women’s public lives have been ‘written’ in music, portraits, and printed images, and their roles in the international exchange of art and material culture.

Brianna E. Robertson-Kirkland is a Lecturer in Historical Musicology at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. Louise Duckling is an independent scholar based in the UK.

c o n t e n t s

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements

Introduction — Brianna Robertson-Kirkland and Louise Duckling

Prologue | Power
Postcard 1  Queen Mary I and La Peregrina — Valerie Schutte
1  Maria Theresa and Catherine II: Women Rulers Transmitting Unexpected Gender Notions far beyond Their Realms — Ruth Dawson

Part 1 | Culture
Postcard 2  The 188-Page Letter-Memoir: Mary Anne Canning’s Life Writing as a Defense of Her Motherhood — Rachel Bynoth
2  Imagining England: Recovering Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy’s Memoirs of the Court of England (1707) — Daisy Winter
3  The Racial Politics of the Chilean Family in Maria Graham’s Journal of a Residence in Chile (1824) — Valentina Aparicio
4  ‘Today, Two Vent’rous Females Spread the Sail’: The Presence of Female Travelers in the Works of Mariana Starke — Eva Lippold

Part 2 | Knowledge
Postcard 3  ‘A New World of Ideas’: Knowledge Exchange in Helen Maria Williams’s Translation of Alexander von Humboldt’s Personal Narrative (1814–29) — Louise Duckling
5  Madeleine de Scudéry, Aphra Behn, and Translation: Using the ‘Carte de Tendre’ for Cross-Channel Communication of Women’s Ideas — Amelia Mills
6  ‘Suns, wich to Some other Worlds Give Light’: Transnational Philosophies of the Universe in Margaret Cavendish’s Poems and Letters — Masuda Qureshi
7  Science, Art, and Knowledge: Nancy Anne Kingsbury Wollstonecraft and the Illustration of Cuban Flora — Elisa Garrido

Part 3 | Art
Postcard 4  Collecting Travel Memories: Charlotte Bonaparte’s Family Album — Arlene Leis
8  Aletheia Talbot and the Art of Italy: England’s First Female Collector — Breeze Barrington
9  Back through Time and beyond Britain: Revealing Polytheistic Imagination and British Imperial Resolve in Eleanor Coade’s Artificial Stone Products, 1769–1821 — Miriam al Jamil

Part 4 | Music
Postcard 5  Mrs Macglashan of Jamaica — Andrew Bull
10  ‘Quite Different from What It Is Abroad’: Elizabeth Wynne’s Musical Exchanges — Penelope Cave
11  The Murrays of Warrawang: Scots in Australia — Brianna Robertson-Kirkland

Epilogue
Postcard 6  Felicia Hemans, the Monument of Zalongo, and the ‘Dance’ of a Moment in History — Trijit Acharyya

Selected Bibliography
List of Contributors
Index