Exile, its pain and possibility, is the starting point of this book. Women's experience of exile was often different from that of men, yet it has not received the important attention it deserves. Women in exile in early modern Europe and the Americas addresses that lacuna through a wide-ranging geographical, chronological, social and cultural approach. Whether powerful, well-to-do or impoverished, exiled by force or choice, every woman faced the question of how to reconstruct her life in a new place. These essays focus on women's agency despite the pressures created by political, economic and social dislocation. Collectively, they demonstrate how these women from different countries, continents and status groups not only survived but also in many cases thrived. This analysis of early modern women's experiences not only provides a new vantage point from which to enrich the study of exile but also contributes important new scholarship to the history of women.

Introduction

PART I: RELIGION AND EXILE
1 Iberian women in exile from the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries - Renée Levine Melammed
2 Hitting bottom before reaching the top: the two exiles of Anne Marguerite Petit Dunoyer, 1686 and 1701 - Colette H, Winn
3 Friends without friends: exile and excommunication from early Quakerism, c.1660-1800 - Naomi Pullin

PART II: ENSLAVEMENT, FREEDOM, AND EXILE
4 Notes to a former self: slavery's time in sixteenth-century Indigenous women's freedom suits - Nancy van Deusen
5 'Be sure thou stay at home': indentured women in the British Atlantic during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries - Anna Suranyi
6 'A Mulatto woman named Margaret': fugitivity and forced exile in the age of American revolution, 1770-1783 - Karen Cook Bell

PART III: POLITICS AND POLITICAL CULTURE
7 Sixteenth-century cast-off consorts: the internal exiles of Catherine of Aragon and Anne of Cleves - Carole Levin
8 Refuge of ill-repute: the characterization of Marguerite de Valois' exile at Usson, 1586-1605 - Adrianna E. Bakos
9 Queen without a country: Elizabeth of Bohemia 1596-1662, exile and the Esther story - Georgianna Ziegler
10 Choosing exile: Aletheia, Countess of Arundel and Elizabeth Ludlow, 1641-1703 - Linda Levy Peck

Index

Editors

Linda Levy Peck is a Professor of History Emerita at George Washington University
Adrianna E. Bakos is an Associate Professor of History at the University of the Fraser Valley