Women's Writing Before Woolf: A Social Reference,/WINK: Women's Invisible Ink

WINK: Women’s Invisible Ink

WINK is a project funded by the European Research Council Starting Grant (European Research Council 2021) that is funded from 2019 to 2024. The project aims to recover lost women’s writing from the 16th to 18th centuries (BBC, 2020). WINK researches the unmaintained body of women’s writing in early European modernity to restore balance to the male paradigm of intellectual value. By surveying the data, which is in many European languages, a methodology is used to scour the writings for trans-genre voices rather than closed genre voices. This is to allow for persuasive arguments to become apparent and show us a clear intellectual input. WINK aims to place intellectual value on a voice that is androcentric to show that women also had transformative, yet underrepresented, authorship (WINK 2021).

How does WINK operate?

Firstly, The project aims to discover how much of women’s intellectual property remains intact, existing but underrepresented, in writings from the early modern period. The research looks at how textual and stylistic factors have promoted women's writing to remain invisible. By using a male-centric epistemology, women’s ways of knowing were often hidden. This research tries to remove the ‘textual misogyny’ by specifying that gender modified and influenced the value of intellectual thinking, rather than pitting the sexes against each other (WINK 2021). Many of the texts they will be looking at have been uncatalogued in private collections and local libraries (BBC 2020).

WINK looks at how women wrote about religion and also autobiographical work, to determine their thoughts and communications about life and the common good. By looking not at the woman behind the text, and focusing only on her writings, WINK uses a method of trans-genre analysis to determine the intellectual value of women’s work, and explore how the history of intellect has been valued higher from the writings of men.

WINK is working on rendering interpretations of texts and piecing together chains of fragmented texts (like letters) to disclose fragments of information that as a whole, exemplifies its meaning and challenges our idea of 'broad literary genre'. This also deals with the issue of a source for the complex construction of the arguments in the text. Lastly, the attribution of intellectual property is considered via a qualitative methodology. By ascertaining how women obtained knowledge, and then attributed it or misattributed it, and then shared it with others. This is done by researching the rendered interpretations for social factors of attribution issues. (WINK, 2021)

Who is WINK

Wink is made up of 5 academic researchers.

Carme Font Paz is the director and principal investigator for the project, based in Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. Carme is tenured at the university as an English Lecturer and her research explores the marginalisation of women’s thought in the early modern period.

Helena Aguilà Ruzola is the postdoctoral researcher and leads the Italian section of the project. Her research concerns early Italian women writers, along with being an experienced literary translator, she also has experience in sixteenth-century translations of Italian works into Spanish.

Maxim Rigaux is a Junior Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at Ghent University who specialises in the cultural and literary histories of Spain and Portugal and is focusing on the interaction of Latin, spoken language, text, race, imagery, and gender as the main part of his research.

Francesca Blanch-Serrat is a teacher and Ph.D. candidate at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona where she focuses on English Romanticism and women poets.

Paula Yurss Lasanta is a post doctoral researcher and teacher at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. Focusing on the 18th century, Paula’s research centers on women writers tied to France and intersecting with feminism, the French Revolution, and Romanticism.

Making Change

WINK regularly holds events and presentations to educate their peers and interested parties on their progress and findings. The work is important because it sheds light on the lost canon of work by an entire gender of authors between the 16th and 18th centuries. By interpreting and researching this work, not only as women’s work but for its epistemological value, it brings the body of knowledge into its rightful space (BBC 2020). The research does not discriminate regarding the genre of the writing, from religious musings to personal communication and literature. Compared to their male counterparts, early modern women writers are rarely featured in the canon of early modern writers or are given a separate category for women’s literature. Via their research, WINK is identifying that important intellectual value is androcentric. The co-authored articles and books the WNK team produces, along with a virtual space for comparative textual analysis, are bringing to life the transformative thinking of the undervalued, understudied, and underrepresented women writers of the early modern period. (Mena Report 2019)

 

References:

BBC 2020, Report of BBC Radio on Wink’s Research on BBC World Service radio, Vimeo,

European Research Council 2020, ERC Funded Projects, website viewed 21 May 2021, europa. eu/ projects-figures/ erc-funded-projects

MENA Report 2019, ”Women’s Invisible Ink: Trans-Genre Writing and the Gendering of Intellectual Value in Early Modernity”, Feb 2 2019, London

WINK 2021, WINK - Women's Invisible Ink, website viewed 21 May 2021

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Further reading:

The book series “Early Modern Women Writers in Europe: Texts, Debates, and Genealogies of Knowledge“ by Brepol Publishing

The Journal Women’s Writing; which publishes research on women’s writing in English from the Middle Ages to the end of the long nineteenth century, covering gender, culture, race, and class.