The Politics of Early Modern Women’s Work: Swallows in Winter, Patricia Simpson, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Focusing on the poetry and political commentary of Anna Ovena Hoyer (1584-1655), Simpson argues that the author’s work exceeds the genre of religious devotion. Instead, she argues, Hoyer’s writing demands gendered agency. In the treatise Ein Schreiben über Meer… (1649), Hoyer occupies the indignant subject position of an old woman empowered to speak against treason and intervene in politics beyond continental Europe. Hoyer inscribes a woman’s right to political judgement, writing to articulate a desire for community—be it fragile and fickle as swallows in winter.