Clio Reframed: Women Writing History, 1500–1750

Clio Reframed: Women Writing History, 1500–1750

18 and 19 June 2026, Corpus Christi College

Impression by Amy Lidster, Conference Organizer

Artemisia Gentileschi, ‘Clio, Muse of History’, 1632, oil on canvas

(lead conference image)

Generously funded by Corpus Christi College, Oxford’s CEMS, and the Society for Renaissance Studies, Clio Reframed brought together scholars for two days devoted to rethinking early modern women’s contributions to historical writing and historiography. It sought to reinvigorate critical approaches to these works and to explore the hybridity of early modern historical writing, which, in the absence of fixed disciplinary methods, could encompass a range of subjects, approaches and forms, including chronicle histories, verse narratives, drama, pamphlets, memoirs, and historical lives. Although recent scholarship has acknowledged this variety by looking beyond major chronicle and humanist histories, women’s contributions to early modern historical culture remain substantially overlooked. Clio Reframed sought to redress that omission by recovering the diversity of women’s historical writing, situating it within the political, religious, social, and textual networks in which it was produced, and resisting any tendency to treat women writers as a homogeneous group.

The resulting programme was both packed and remarkably coherent. Held in Corpus Christi’s bright and welcoming auditorium, the conference combined keynote lectures by Danielle Clarke (University College Dublin), Claire Gheeraert-Graffeuille (Université de Rouen Normandie), Emilie Murphy (University of York), and Sue Wiseman (Birkbeck, University of London) with a rich series of panel papers. It encouraged global perspectives, interdisciplinary approaches, and discussion of texts written in languages other than English. A particular aim was to create connections across authors, genres, periods, and national or confessional contexts, and one of the event’s strengths was the ease with which these conversations developed. Emilie Murphy’s opening keynote, for example, explored the importance of English Catholic convent writing to historical method and communal memory. The following panel extended these questions through studies of nuns’ historical writing in the Abbey of Port-Royal, Reformation Geneva, seventeenth-century Lutheran convents, and the aftermath of the German Peasants’ War, opening up discussion about collective authorship, persecution, confession, and memory.

Emilie Murphy’s keynote on ‘Cloistered Missionaries: English Nuns, Historical Writing, and the Reclaiming of Catholic England’

That combination of breadth and connection continued across the two days. Discussion ranged from marginalia in Mary Sidney Herbert’s Antonius and Bess Carey’s historical reading and patronage to a newly uncovered manuscript life of Beatrice II of Este, Elizabeth Elstob as a self-taught Anglo-Saxonist and scholar at Oxford, and the complicated status of Johanna Dorothea Lindenaer’s memoir that interweaves history, fiction, and religious polemic. Celia Fiennes’s travel writing opened further perspectives on mobility, landscape, and historical narration, while papers on the Battle of Lepanto in Italian women’s poetry and Anna Trapnel’s war music demonstrated how verse, voice, and lyrical strategies participated in political and military historiography, before the final panel brought Lucy Hutchinson, Aphra Behn, and Margaret Cavendish into conversation around the contested memory and political afterlives of the English Civil Wars. Across the programme, manuscript and print, prose and poetry, letters and domestic archives, translation and memoir all became part of a wider picture of what historical writing could be.

Several large questions emerged with particular force. Most fundamentally, the conference challenged us to ask what we recognise as history, and why. If women recorded and interpreted the past through family books, correspondence, devotional narratives, poetry, drama, travel accounts, and translation, then recovering contributions requires more than adding forgotten women to an existing canon. It also requires reconsidering the categories through which historical writing itself has been defined and recognizing the formal hybridity of this writing and the different readerships it imagined.

Questions of historical authority were equally important. The papers repeatedly demonstrated that history was rarely produced by an isolated author: it depended on families and religious communities, patrons and publishers, inherited papers, editorial choices, and acts of preservation. Danielle Clarke’s keynote on family history, descent, and ‘forms of history making’ spoke powerfully to these issues, while discussions of domestic and familial archives underscored that archives are themselves created through decisions about what to collect, organise, transmit, or destroy. Sue Wiseman’s keynote reflected on the parameters of ‘historical thought’, substituting this term for ‘history’ and expanding the range of texts that demonstrate this process, while Claire Gheeraert-Graffeuille’s concluding keynote on Lucy Hutchinson’s Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson explored the relationship between form and history, including the importance of literary craft and formal strategies for understanding historical method. Across these approaches, gender remained crucial without becoming reductive, essentialist, or uniform: women’s relationships to the past were shaped by social status, confessional identity, geography, family networks, political allegiance, and access to texts and sources.

The conference therefore ended with a productive set of new questions about historiography, authorship, genre, and the archive. How might accounts of historical writing change when we look for historical method in texts that do not explicitly announce themselves as histories? What happens to ideas of authorship when historical writing depends on collaboration, translation, patronage, archival curation, or scribal mediation? How might comparative and multilingual critical work transform our understanding of these texts? Clio Reframed was conceived as a beginning rather than an endpoint. Its ongoing research blog continues to explore these questions, while a new research network on early modern women’s historical writing is being established to sustain the conversations begun at Oxford and develop new directions for collaborative research.

Further details about the conference, its programme, and research blog can be found here: https://clioreframed.hcommons.org