This collection of essays covers women across Europe ( e.g. Anna Maria van Schurman) and England and offers insights not only into women's letter writing, but also into the boundaries of script and print, the complexities of early modern literacy, the intersection of public and private spaces, and the ways that women garnered power through direct and indirect means. Many authors offer quotations and translations of manuscript letters otherwise inaccessible to most readers.
The eighteenth century is recognized as a complex period of dramatic epistemic shifts that would have profound effects on the modern world. This collection of essays addresses women's activities as patrons and as 'patronized' artists over the course of the century. Some essays are concerned with how women's involvement in the arts allowed them to fashion identities for themselves (whether national, political, religious, intellectual, artistic, or gender-based) and how such self-fashioning in turn enabled them to negotiate or intervene in the public domains of culture and politics where 'The Woman Question' was so hotly debated. Other essays examine how men's patronage of women also served as a vehicle for self-fashioning for both artist and sponsor. Artists and patrons discussed include: Carriera: Queen Lovisa Ulrike and Chardin: the Bourbon Princesses Mlle Clermont, Mme Adélaïde and Nattier: the Duchess of Osuna and Goya: Marie-Antoinette and Vigée-Lebrun: Labille-Guiard: Queen Carolina of Naples, Prince Stanislaus Poniatowski of Poland and Kauffman: David and his students, Mesdames Benoist, Lavoisier and Mongez.