CEMS and the ANU Cultures of Screen, Performance and Print Network (CuSPP) are pleased to co-host this seminar with Professor Danielle Clarke (UCD).
When: 19 March 2026 (details forthcoming)
Abstract
This talk traces the connections between the increasingly prevalent practice of account-keeping and the use of time and numbers in early modern women’s life writings. Using a range of examples from the seventeenth century, I argue that life writings by early modern women represent women’s capacity to manage time, both as a quotidian resource (the profitable use of time) and as a spiritual and long-term resource. This ability depends upon their mastery of a range of literacy skills and practices, but also asserts their centrality to family record keeping, which in turn is crucial to ideas of property, genealogy, and descent. Women’s spiritual diaries and ego-documents operate in the space between past and future that contemporary writers like Henry King and Isaac Ambrose suggested was crucial to preparation for the life to come and tend to narrate the present as always in process. This present continuous is registered at the material level of the texts’ production, which I demonstrate is frequently iterative and recursive as is account-keeping. Additions, rewritings, and returns are expressed materially in many of these manuscripts, as revisions, as pages divided into sections where narratives and text compete with and tumble over each other. Other textual practices, such as note-taking, common-placing and making marginal notations or marks also suggest the non-sequential and non-linear nature of women’s textual engagement. Using the examples of Martha Molesworth and Katherine Austen, I discuss how accounting manifests at a discursive and a material level, and how this is used as a way of managing time.
About the Speaker
Danielle Clarke was educated in London and Oxford before coming to UCD. Most of her publications deal with writing by early modern women, their engagement with mainstream literary culture in particular. Other areas in which she has published include sexuality, literary theory, translation in the Renaissance, and textual criticism. Professor Clarke is currently working on a number of projects – a monograph called Forms of Women’s Writing, 1550-1700: Quotidian Writing and Literary Production; work on Irish recipe books from the 17th and early 18th centuries; and a modern spelling edition of the poetry of Lady Anne Southwell (1574-1636) with Victoria Burke and Christina Luckyj for The Other Voice series. She is also the co-editor (with Sarah C.E.Ross and Elizabeth Scott-Baumann) of the Oxford Handbook of Early Modern Women’s Writing In English, 1540-1700, winner of the Roland Bainton Prize for a reference book, and of the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women and Gender prize for a collaborative project. She recently edited a special issue of Women’s Writing on Isabella Whitney, and her article “Lady Anne Southwell, Scripture, and the Landscapes of Early Modern Ireland” is forthcoming in Renaissance Quarterly 78.4 (Winter 2025). Danielle holds the Emmerson Fellowship at the State Library of Victoria, Melbourne for 2025-26, and will be delivering the Foxcroft Lecture there in Spring 2026.