Learned Woman in the Early Modern Era

Abstract

What possibilities did women in the early modern era have to acquire learned knowledge and what social positions could they achieve through scholarliness? Assuming that knowledge was not accessible to all people equally in the early modern era, the articles in this anthology examine the social, political, and representative functions of the acquirement of knowledge and the processes of change in hierarchical status connected to these. The obvious gender-specific allocation of knowledge and scholarliness are thus put to question anew. The study of non-institutionalized forms of the exchange of knowledge makes it possible to examine the social role of men and women with new insight without making women understood merely as “objects of research on exclusion” (11).