Situating Women’s Private Practices of Knowledge Production in the Early Modern Context

This chapter introduces the book Women’s Private Practices of Knowledge Production in Early Modern Europe by exploring the interplays of gender, knowledge-making practices, and notions of privacy in the broader early modern European context. Paying heed to recent development in the historiography of women’s intellectual works in relation to their association to the private realm, this chapter proposes an understanding of privacy as a privilege—although under constant negotiation—that elite women could instrumentalize in their knowledge pursuits, a notion that the following chapters flesh out in their nuanced case studies.