SOCIETY FOR THE STUDY OF FRENCH HISTORY
SOCIETY AWARDS
CONFERENCE BURSARIES
Case Study - October 2001
Cathy McClive was awarded a conference bursary of £100 from the Society for French History. In October 2001 Cathy McClive received a conference bursary of £100 from the Society for French History which she used towards the cost of travelling to the USA to participate in the Twelfth Berkshire Conference for Women's History, University of Connecticut at Storrs, U.S.A. 6-9 June 2002. Here she reports on the conference:
"In October 2001 I was awarded a conference bursary of £100 by the Society for French History to help towards the costs of travelling to America. The purpose of my visit to the USA was to participate in the Twelfth Berkshire Conference for Women's Historians. The theme of the conference was 'Local Knowledge - Global Knowledge' and I was involved in a panel entitled 'Knowing and Experiencing Reproduction and Illness'. I gave a twenty-five minute presentation on 'Languages of Conception in Early Modern France'. The forum of the Berkshire Conference rewards the speaker with formal comments from a chosen commentator (in my case Mark Jackson from Exeter University) who discusses both the panel as a whole and each individual paper, as well as the standard open discussion at the end of the session. In both instances I received extremely helpful and insightful remarks which will greatly enhance the re-writing of the paper as a thesis chapter. I was pleased to see that although I need to re-work some areas of the paper, my ideas regarding bodily time were well received. I was also approached after my paper by the editors of Ashgate's recently launched series on 'Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe' who expressed an interest in publishing my thesis (once it is finished)! The Berks was a useful experience because it is the first time I have been able to attend and participate in such a large-scale international conference. There were over 2,000 participants from Australia, Japan, Europe, Canada and America. A huge number of parallel sessions with almost 25 panels per session covered a wide range of topics, geographical regions and historical periods. Although many panels covered feminist histories, with a marked preference for the modern period I was able to hear renowned early modern scholars such as Mary Perry and to meet others such as Lyn Botelho. I was hoping to meet Sarah Hanley, a specialist in sixteenth-century French legal history, but unfortunately she was not able to attend. I also went to an exciting and provocative panel on 'revisiting the honour/shame paradigm in early modern Spain and Italy'. Here the speakers suggested that sexual honour is not a useful category for historical analysis. Instead we should be looking for different types of honour related to identity, societal roles and socio-cultural context rather than seeking to link shame solely to transgressed sexual mores. They also argued that shame/honour were very much relative to the historical and geographical location. This panel was useful in terms of my own research because my work on late-births and menstrual irregularities touches upon concepts of honour and shame and indeed I want to argue that female narratives were less driven by sexual honour than by other concerns. I also gained useful contacts with two scholars working on hermaphrodism in nineteenth century Holland and Russia respectively. I am hoping to include a chapter on sexual difference and hermaphrodism in my thesis so this was very helpful.
On the whole the twelfth Berks was a very stimulating conference urging participants to take multidisciplinary approaches to the history of women and to resist polarisation and over-simplification. In particular, the presidential address by renowned scholar Joan W. Scott, insisted on an analysis of the complexities and variations in any given historical topic. The overwhelming message being that there is no one predominant type of 'knowledge', but a series of over-lapping forms of 'knowledge' expressed through different media according to the local, regional and historical context."