Women in Exile in Early Modern Europe and the Americas

Exile, loss of homeland through compulsion or choice, has confronted women from prehistory to the present day. Women in exile in early modern Europe and the Americas analyses the important yet largely untold stories of women exiles of diverse status, origin, and political and religious outlook between 1492 and 1790. They include Jewish women expelled from Spain, Indigenous women enslaved and taken to Spain, British indentured women crossing the Atlantic, and enslaved African women transported to the Americas. Religious and political upheavals of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries created other exiles: Huguenot women went to the Netherlands and England, English royalists left for the Netherlands and France, while English radicals went to the continent and even Connecticut. Women in exile explores how these women faced life-changing questions of whether and where to go and how to create a new life in a new home. The book's themes include women's crucial efforts to turn to religious, political, and family networks, although not always with success. Whether poor or royal, their financial circumstances remained precarious. Drawing on varied primary sources, the book captures women's narratives of exile. In many ways, the experience of exile could become a constitutive element of identity, shaping how these women viewed themselves and how they were viewed by others. Women often exercised extraordinary agency, many grasped new opportunities despite adversity. Women in Exile not only provides a new vantage point from which to enrich the study of exile but also contributes significant new scholarship to the history of women.