The new interpretive turn in gender studies is disseminated and discussed particularly in North American scholarly journals, and is situated at the intersection between the historiographies of family, women and gender (including men’s studies) and world history.\ud
This has displaced in the direction of ‘world’ or ‘global history’ a practice of writing European history which has traditionally privileged circumscribed, ‘particular’ areas of enquiry, located within the boundaries of communities, regions and nations. To avoid becoming passive latecomers in a new master narrative, where imbalances of power and unequal distribution of academic, linguistic and financial resources tend to marginalize large areas of the world, the tradition of women’s history/gender historiography should seek to develop transcultural cooperation with critical historiographies in non-Western areas, with the aim of constructing an ecumenical narrative of world history
Trying to trace seventeenth-century Florentine family memoirs, I came upon a manuscript journal entirely written by a woman. Its frontispiece bore a date, 1623, and a heading: “In the name of God, the glorious Virgin Mary and all the saints of the Heavenly Court of Paradise, this book is the journal of signora Maddalena Nerli Tornabuoni, and in it she will keep a record of all her daily accounts starting from this very day in March 1623.“As the title specified, it was mainly an account book that covered twenty years of Maddalena's widowed life up to her death in 1641. Going carefully through its pages made me begin to perceive the boundaries of a domestic world organized and governed by a middle-aged urban patrician woman. It shed light on the social world she lived in, one of children, servants, close relatives, and sharecroppers; on the concrete material objects she was surrounded by—linens, foodstuffs, furniture, clothes, devotional items; and on the physical space she occupied—city and country homes, the district of S. Maria Novella and S. Giovanni in Florence.
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