To those dear others who helped us to become mothers: Hugh Miller and Ray Shattenkirk; and to our children, who teach us what it means to be mothers every day: Fiona, Isaiah, Damaris and Elias Miller, and Shoshana, Raphael, Isabella and Lily Shattenkirk.
First published 2000 by Ashgate Publishing
Reissued 2019 by Routledge
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Copyright Naomi J. Miller and Naomi Yavneh 2000
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ISBN 13: 978-1-138-72556-0 (hbk)
ISBN 13: 978-1-315-19180-5 (ebk)
Our collaboration as editors has been a true gestation of spirit, mind, and heart, resulting in this collection of essays that speaks to the issues of mothers and others in the early modern world as well as our own. We ourselves met when we were looking at the same book at an MLA book exhibit in Chicago in December 1990, and realized that we shared the same first name, and the same interests, and even the same alma mater of Princeton from undergraduate days. We also shared our experience as young mothers, leading to our first collaboration, the following December 1991, in an MLA session entitled This Self Which Is Not One: Childbearing, Childrearing, and the Profession.
Further MLA sessions followed, as well as professional collaboration in Renaissance Society of America conferences and the marvelous Attending to Early Modem Women conferences every three years at the University of Maryland, College Park, where we first sketched out our hopes and ideas for this collection of essays on mothers and others, that has come to be titled Maternal Measures, and has found a home with the Ashgate Publishing series on Women and Gender in the Early Modem World. In the meantime, children followed as well, so that our collaboration as co-editors [known to our contributors as the Naomis] has also been marked by our shared experience of each giving birth to four children before receiving tenure. Thus, the dedication to this volume
We should like to thank many individuals who have contributed to the labor and delivery of this special volume of essays, not the least our outstanding contributors, who have seen the volume through many stages, and whose essays speak for themselves. We should like to give particular thanks and gratitude to Betty Travitsky and Patrick Cullen, whose instmctive comments and patient encouragement and advice have brought the volume to full term. Thank you, Betty and Patrick, for your caregiving in the truest sense.
We should also like to thank Erika Gaffney, Ashgate Publishing, for being editor, friend, and colleague all in one. The fact that our work on this volume brought us into contact with Erika has been one of many unexpected blessings for which we give thanks. We are grateful, too, for the help and guidance of Ellen Keeling, senior editor, Ashgate Publishing, and look forward to meeting her some day. And we should like to express our appreciation to Rachel Lynch, the original commissioning editor at Ashgate who welcomed our volume.
We appreciate the comments and encouragements of many fellow scholars along the way, including Elaine Beilin, Heather Dubrow, Valeria Finucci, Margaret Hannay, Barbara Lewalski, Margaret Rosenthal and Walter Stephens.
We learned a great deal from the readers comments on the volume as well, and have been fortunate to have the opportunity to revise and reshape the volume in accord with the many suggestions we received.
We leave the volume, now, to the care of our current series editors, Allyson Poska and Abby Zanger, with whom we are happy to be working.
Naomi Miller wishes to thank, first, her own mother Dr. Nobuko Ishii, who has so often lit the way ahead, as teacher and scholar as well as mother. Next, she wishes to thank her unflappable friends and fellow scholars in early modern studies, whose humor and wisdom have assisted her not only in her work on this volume, but in many other endeavors: Emily Bartels, Carol Ann Johnston, Laura Lunger Knoppers, and, particularly, Mary Thomas Crane, with whom she first shared the experience of motherhood, then, and now, and always. Throughout the experience of working on this volume, Naomi Miller has been supremely grateful for the presence of Naomi Yavneh: friend, confidante, co-editor, and other mother for all seasons.
From the University of Arizona, a Small Grants Award and a Humanities Research Initiative Grant supported the necessary archival research that has provided the basis for Naomi Millers work on this volume, as well as on other research projects on maternity in early modern England.
Finally, Naomi Miller thanks her husband, Hugh, and her children, Fiona, Isaiah, Damaris, and Elias, for bringing joy, challenge, and wonder in contrapuntal harmony to each day of her life.
Naomi Yavneh would like to thank Deborah Steinberger, Susan Overton, Giovanna Benadusi, Fraser Ottanelli, Silvio Gaggi, Daniel Belgrad, Ruth Banes, Priscilla Brewer, Jim DEmilio, Paula Lee. She also appreciates the help of Nancy Baisden, Aline Wilson and Hopeanne Pendelton, and of her students, especially Dorothy Brockman, Claudia Conti and Aristoula Mandelos.
A Deans Development Grant from the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of South Florida supported the research for Naomi Yavnehs portion of the volume.
Finally, she would like to thank the matriarchs of her family: Anne Marcus and Anna Yavneh, Kuni Yavneh, Tenli Yavneh, Nina Steinberg and Lee Shattenkirk; her dear friend Naomi Miller (the Other Naomi and the first to b4); her husband, Ray Shattenkirk; and, most of all, her children Shoshana, Raphael, Isabella Hannalee and Lily Ariana who fill her life with joy, music and excitement.
