Elite Women in Early Modern Catholic Europe

Cinzia Recca, Francisco Precioso Izquierdo

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2025
• eBook ISBN: 9781040310854
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Early Modern History
• Index: History

Elite Women in Early Modern Catholic Europe offers a new look at early modern Catholic Europe through the lens of the diverse experiences of elite women, using a historiographical approach to analyze women's roles through changing political, social, and cultural contexts.

Through novel practices and broad social networks, distinguished women assumed prominent roles, from queens and princesses, to aristocrats and great nobles, to women of faith and religion. As the Counter-Reformation and the transition toward Enlightenment ideology swept France, Spain, and Italy, literacy and education became more accessible to upper-class women, who began to create new traditions in place of the old ways that were falling short. The case studies in this volume, ranging from the seventeenth to early nineteenth centuries, uncover the ways in which women were developing leadership skills and preserving status through participation in historical processes that affected real estate, the Church, and the social and family organization across Catholic Europe.

This book is an ideal resource for students and researchers studying early modern women and Catholic Europe.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• List of contributors
• Elite women in early modern Catholic Europe Introduction
• 1 Naples 1536, or rather of nobility, Politics, and noblewomen
• 2 Building memory: Margherita of Austria and her dynastic history “en femenino”
• 3 Chocolate, masses, and spiritual heritage: Female networks in early modern Turin around the Compagnia dell’ Umiltà (company of humility): seventeenth to eighteenth centuries
• 4 “In the distressing circumstances”: Female resolve and resistance of rank: Marguerite-Louise d’Orléans and Anna Maria Franziska of Saxe-Lauenburg in diplomatic records
• 5 Women in the family and political strategies of the high aristocracy in the late seventeenth century
• 6 Educating a future queen of France. The case of Princess Marie Adelaide of Savoy and Madame de Maintenon, royal educator
• 7 Noblewomen and the management of family wealth in Sicily at the end of the eighteenth century: The case of Anna Morso, the Princess of Biscari
• 8 Family and female power: The wills of aristocratic women in Spain at the end of the Ancien Régime
• 9 A place for sentiments and feelings among Spanish aristocratic women: (1760–1820)
• 10 “Considering the merits of your late husband…”. How women received a title in early nineteenth-century Spain (1808–1854)
• Index