On 11 March 2025, two RELICS members, Simon Smets and Alex Tadel, organized a virtual roundtable to discuss women as authors of Latin literature. This blogpost by Alex Tadel provides an overview of the event.
The roundtable started with six five-minute ‘impulse talks’. The first speaker, Johanna Luggin from the University of Innsbruck, presented a new project on early modern women’s Latin scientific texts. Her talk questioned whether the concepts of agency and impact are useful for the study of women writers. The next speakers were Giacomo Evangelisti and Chiara Bellaveglia, doctoral reseachers at La Sapienza, who talked about Centro Medioeva, an international collaboration that promotes research into women writers in the medieval period and makes efforts to introduce texts by women into the Italian high school curriculum. Patrick Burns, research scholar at New York University, brought a digital humanities angle to the discussion, presenting a project he is leading that will provide a linguistic dataset of Latin texts written by women.
Next, Skye Shirley, a recent doctoral graduate and founder of Lupercal, emphasized the importance of collaboration and openness in our efforts to give women’s production in Latin the visibility and recognition they merit. Anne Larsen and Steve Maiullo, professors at Hope College, talked about Anna Maria van Schurman and the need to situate women writers carefully in their particular historical contexts. Finally, Jane Stevenson shared her perspective on the evolution of the field, which she traced from an initial focus on women Latin writers of fifteenth-century Italy that has since expanded to include writers from other regions and periods.
Then a discussion between the contributors, and later on between the contributors and the audience followed. Participants reemphasized the need to integrate texts by women into school and university curricula. Another issue that was raised was whether focusing on women Latin writers can have an adverse impact on researchers’ career prospects. Several participants responded to Skye Shirley’s talk on the importance of collective efforts and highlighted the need for support among students and researchers in the field. We hope that this roundtable may prove to have been a starting point of future collaborations.
RELICS 