ABSTRACT
The vast majority of historical sources in early modern Europe, including every category of source that you read about in the first half of this book, were created by men, and many of them for a largely male audience of fellow scholars, officials and bureaucrats. Thus they are gendered. This fact might seem self-evident to us in the early twenty-first century, when gender is a commonplace category, but it was not when the field of early modern history was being created during the 1950s and 1960s.1 Most studies focused on men’s experiences, but paid little attention to the fact that their subjects were male and instead described them as, say, ‘Renaissance thinkers’ or ‘puritans’ or ‘nobles’ or ‘Londoners’, thus universalizing their findings, often unconsciously. The feminist movement that began in the 1970s changed this, as it changed so much else. Advocates of women’s rights in the present began to investigate the lives of women in the past, which led to a rethinking of the way that history was organized and structured. Widely accepted generalizations about the Renaissance, puritans, nobles or Londoners did not necessarily apply once the focus included women; for the early modern period as well as for other eras, women’s history disrupted categories such as historical period, religion, social class and geographic location.2
