Event
Exhibition «Women of Wit. Golden Pens in the Century of Letters»
Casa Museo Lope de Vega recalls women writers whose books were once read at court, in convents and in private salons, and who were later almost erased from literary history.
About this event
An exhibition dedicated to women whose texts remained on the margins of Spanish literary history for centuries opens at Casa Museo Lope de Vega.
The project «Women of Wit. Golden Pens in the Century of Letters» brings together manuscripts, early editions and portraits of Golden Age women writers, authors who created plays, poetry and prose in an era when the female voice rarely crossed the boundaries of private life.
The exhibition is structured as a journey through the different worlds in which sixteenth- and seventeenth-century women wrote: courtly salons, urban homes and convents. Its protagonists include María de Zayas, Ana Caro de Mallén, Sister Marcela de San Félix and other authors whose works long remained in the shadow of better-known male names.
The exhibition also shows how literature became for many women a way to exist outside the usual roles of their era, even when publishing was almost impossible.
Materials from Biblioteca Nacional de España, Museo del Prado, Museo Lázaro Galdiano and various Spanish monastic archives have been assembled for the project.