Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book examines a capacious set of questions about the gendering of early modern routes and spaces. It turns a key theme of scholarship that part of the spatial turn: embodied environments. It examines a ways in which communities and networks of women created and maintained connections as they challenged physical and conceptual boundaries. It turns another key theme within the spatial and global turns exchange. The book begins with three framing essays, each of which includes consideration of the state of scholarly field, along with more focused examination of specific key issues. In 'History in the Present Tense: Feminist Theories, Spatialized Epistemologies and Early Modern Embodiment', Valerie Traub actually opens with surveys of two scholarly fields. The book explores more expansive environments, moving from inner and outer body to the interiors of buildings to invented and built landscape and finally to the public marketplace.