SESSION: Women in printing before 1800

Charting the role of women in early modern printmaking is made difficult by the general erasure of women’s voices within the records of this time. In a European context, the contribution of women to visual culture was generally hidden behind either a male figure or anonymised by the nature of the craft/work undertaken. Restrictions were placed on women in commercial contexts, with “guardians” often appointed by authorities to manage a family business if no suitable man of age was available. This panel examines examples from the German lands, Poland, England, and Italy, from both lay and religious contexts, to present a broader understanding of how women in printing can articulate how early modern women demonstrated agency through their participation in the production of visual culture.

Session Convenors:

Jonathan Trayner, Southampton Solent University

Session Speakers:

Paulina Gąsiorowska, Brown University (RI)

The Printer’s Widow: Recovering An Archetype Across Mid-16th Century Europe

Much feminist scholarship in art and literary histories of early modernity has been dedicated to unearthing the remarkable biographies of Europe’s first women printers. Predominantly, however, these studies have been limited in scope to one figure or one country, and to discussing these women only as legal or social subjects rather than as entrepreneurial and aesthetic agents too. Thus, this paper reinterprets the mid-16th-century printer’s widow from an isolated regional peculiarity into an established cross-cultural archetype of early modern European womanhood—one engaged in commercial choices about her business and in creative choices about her published texts. The argument brings together the lives and works of four women printers: the German Kunigunde Hergotin (before 1520–1547), the Polish Helena Unglerowa (before 1525–1551), the French Charlotte Guillard (1485–1557), and the English Elizabeth Pickering (1510–1562). Opening with an empathetic tracing of their individual biographies, it transitions into deriving personal, professional, and cultural juxtapositions across their respective languages, audiences, and genres. Close reading and looking into illustrative programs, typographic variations, and paratextual self-representations support this interpretative trajectory throughout. This serves to accentuate Hergotin’s, Unglerowa’s, Guillard’s, and Pickering’s approaches to their books both as commercial and as creative objects. Ultimately, the paper’s comparative techniques focalised on biographical and bibliographical detail, aim to ‘de-isolate’ and ‘re-aestheticize’ the complex histories of these printers’ widows—that is, legitimise their lives as integral elements of a significant historical phenomenon and validate their works as worthy of art historical study, scrutiny, and appreciation.

Jonathan Trayner, Southampton Solent University (UK)

Katharina Speich, publisher of The Twelve Articles?

In Strasbourg in 1525, the workshop of Matthias Schürer (operational ca.1503-1527) published an imprint of the anonymous list of peasant demands, The Twelve Articles of the Upper Swabian Peasants, one of the key pamphlets of the German Peasants’ War. However, Schürer himself had died in 1519, and the press was probably continued in his name by his widow, Katharina Speich, under the “guardianship” of Jakob Frölich. The Schürer press was a core component of the intellectual life of Strasbourg in the early Reformation, operating in the same milieu as Martin Bucer, Matthew Zell, and Katharina Schütz Zell and produced reform-oriented texts throughout both Matthias’s life and the subsequent operation of his “heirs”. Archival work by Josef Benzing in the 1960s established the limited evidence around Katharina’s continuation of the press until 1525, with a subsequent study expanding the press’s operation until 1527. Considering the subsequent development of our understanding of the roles of women in early-modern social and economic life, this paper will examine the aesthetic and politico-religious aspects of the press’s output both before and after 1519. It will then compare these to both the materials produced by Lazarus Schürer’s (Matthais’ nephew) Schlettstadt press and the wider scope of reforming publication in Strasbourg to discover if these methodologies can shed further light on the role that Katharina played in the printing of the early Reformation.

Emma P. Holter, Temple University (PA)

Isabella Piccini: A Nun-Printmaker in 17th-century Venice

This paper spotlights the career of an understudied seventeenth-century cloistered female printmaker, and the graphic art she created in a conventual setting for the Venetian public. Born in Venice in 1644, Elisabetta Piccini learned the art of engraving in her father’s workshop, and eventually designed, produced, and signed her own independent prints. In 1666, at the age of 22, she took the veil, adopting the professed name Suor Isabella Piccini. When she entered the convent of Santa Croce, she struck up an unusual financial agreement: if she earned an annual income from her printmaking, she would be exempt from daily chores and responsibilities. Over the next seven decades, she produced prints for hundreds of missals, breviaries, prayer books, and hagiographies, and established a commercial network of liturgical publishers that stretched from her native city, across the Venetian terraferma empire, to the neighbouring Italian states. Through her prolific output, she was enormously commercially successful, allowing her to financially support her monastic community, collaborate with fellow nun-printmakers, and earn praise and support from ecclesiastics, aristocrats, and laypeople alike. Following her death aged 90, imitators and counterfeiters signed her name to their prints to profit from her reputation. This paper analyzes Suor Isabella’s artistic agency as a female printmaker from behind the cloistered walls of Santa Croce.