The exhibition Wise and Valiant: Women and Writing in the Spanish Golden Age rescues nearly 30 women from historical oblivion in a display of over 40 manuscripts and publications.

(...) In Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote, the lovelorn Cardenio famously asks, “What man can pretend to know the riddle of a woman’s mind?” Cardenio had a point: while Cervantes, Lope de Vega, Francisco de Quevedo, and other men were defining Spain’s Golden Age with their poetry, prose, and plays, most Spanish women were illiterate and stuck at home or educated in cloistered convents. It was hard to know what 16th- and 17th-century Spanish women were thinking because so few españolas had ways of articulating themselves. Now an exhibition sheds light on the extraordinary but overlooked women who not only spoke their minds, but published them, too. 

They may not be memorialized by statues and street names, but hundreds of Spanish women wrote and printed their thoughts in Cervantes’s time. Wise and Valiant: Women and Writing in the Spanish Golden Age rescues nearly 30 of them from historical oblivion in a display of over 40 manuscripts and publications — most of which have never previously been shown publicly — that span poetry, history, biography, diaries, letters, plays, novels, and travel books. The exhibition is available online in Spanish and English, a format well-suited to this dense, delicate material, and to Wise and Valiant’s history-expanding ethos (...)

Read more here: Hyperallergic