Towards a Gendered, Decentred History of Cultural Mediation in the Eighteenth Century

Abstract

How can transnational and global perspectives on the Enlightenment and approaches that take gender as a standpoint fertilise each other? This volume aims at doing so by exploring women’s contributions to cultural mediation and the ways in which notions of gender circulated and were transformed, hybridised and creatively appropriated in contextualised and material forms. The introduction considers previous scholarship on eighteenth-century travel, translation and cultural circulation, and on women’s participation in intellectual and cultural life, to propose new avenues for research that expand the geography of Enlightenment to cover Southern Europe and the Hispanic world. It also highlights how examining debates about women’s “nature” from Madrid and Paris to Mexico and Peru (and the other way round), and looking at the roles of women of letters, travellers, translators, readers, owners of books and agents in multilingual epistolary networks provide fresh knowledge on the workings of transnational and transoceanic exchanges, and the obstacles and limits to circulation and mobility.