Women on the Move in Exile Early Modern Europe and Americas

Women in exile in early modern Europe and the Americas presents the important yet largely untold stories of a diverse group of women exiled across the Atlantic world in the early modern period. The book provides a new vantage point from which to enrich the study of exile and also contributes important new scholarship to the history of women. Exile, the loss of homeland through compulsion or choice, has confronted women from prehistory to the present day. Women in exile in early modern Europe and the Americas analyses the important but largely untold stories of women exiles of diverse status, origin, and political and religious outlook between 1492 and 1790. They include Jewish women expelled from Spain, Indigenous women enslaved and taken to Europe, British indentured women crossing the Atlantic, and enslaved African women transported to the Americas. Religious and political upheavals of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries created other exiles: Huguenot women went to the Netherlands and England, English royalists left for the Netherlands and France, while English radicals went to the continent and North America. Women in exile explores how these women faced life-changing questions of whether and where to go, and how to create a new life in a new home, and shows how women’s crucial efforts to turn to religious, political and family networks were not always met with success. Whether poor or royal, their financial circumstances remained precarious. Drawing on rich primary sources, chapters capture women’s narratives of exile. In many ways, the experience of exile could become a constitutive element of identity and agency, shaping how these women viewed themselves and how they were viewed by others. This volume not only provides a new vantage point from which to enrich the study of exile but also contributes significant new scholarship to the history of women. Exile, its pain and possibility, is the starting point of this book. Women’s experience of exile was often different from that of men, yet it has not received the important attention it deserves. Women in exile in early modern Europe and the Americas addresses that lacuna through a wide-ranging geographical, chronological, social and cultural approach. Whether powerful, well-to-do or impoverished, exiled by force or choice, every woman faced the question of how to reconstruct her life in a new place. These essays focus on women’s agency despite the pressures created by political, economic and social dislocation. Collectively, they demonstrate how these women from different countries, continents and status groups not only survived but also in many cases thrived. This analysis of early modern women’s experiences not only provides a new vantage point from which to enrich the study of exile but also contributes important new scholarship to the history of women.