ABSTRACT
This chapter examines women’s material production to explore modes of intervention within regional systems of power. Artifacts such as embroidery, habit, drama, and biblical commentary shaped both their responses and representations of resistance. Local culture formed and informed their choices of media. We draw from three distinct archives to consider methods of resistance available to women during the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Taken together, these complicate notions of women’s agency, of public and private space, and suggest that the power of stories to animate and inspire took many guises. Material traces, ranging from the concrete, to the ephemeral, to the imagined, allow opportunities to assess women’s agency that might otherwise remain absent from other, more conventional, archives.
