“Is time gendered?” With this question, Merry Wiesner-Hanks introduces the provocatively titled Gendered Temporalities in the Early Modern World. She describes the scope of the collection as transnational, although of the eleven contributions only two—one on seventeenth-century Aceh (today an autonomous province in Indonesia) and another on Virginia—move outside Europe. The European range is, however, impressively wide, including contributions on the Netherlands, Spain, Italy, England, and Germany. Many of the essays were originally presented at the “Attending to Early Modern Women” conference held in 2015.

Two broad premises form the interpretive bases of the volume: “time is an embedded aspect of human existence, but also [one] mediated by culture” and “experiences and understandings of time change” (9). The editor has defined the concept of temporality broadly, allowing for varied interpretations of its meaning. One expects, therefore, that the contributors will focus on the several ways in which gender affects and effects the experience of time and highlight the numerous complexities of time and time experiences. Unfortunately, several of the essays seem to fit awkwardly, or hardly at all, into the framework originally set out by the editor. Presenting various treatments of temporality, spatiality, and materiality, these pieces do not always make clear how their subject matter and their arguments link to the themes laid out in the introduction. How, for example, do treatments of memory and genealogy illuminate temporalities (as in Su Fan Nu's essay on Aceh), or how was temporality “embodied” in Lurcrezia Tornabuoni de’ Medici's sacra storia or Donataello's Judith (in the essay by Allie Terry-Fritsch)? This reviewer experienced similar problems figuring out how the final essay, an “epilogue” on teaching early modern women's writing, explored temporality or spoke to the other essays in the volume except in the most general and obvious way (the subject was gender). None of these essays are poorly written or weakly argued; indeed these three (as well as others in the volume) offer insightful analyses and interpretations. The problem is of a different nature: they lacked clarity about the meaning of temporality or exactly how their contributions engaged it.

While difficulties of fit plagued the volume as a whole, some essays successfully and intelligently addressed issues of “gendered temporality.” Alisha Rankin's analysis of the medical temporality of the female body—reckoned through menstrual cycles, pregnancy, and childbirth—and the triply authored essay on “Maybe Baby,” by Holly Barbaccia, Bethany Packard, and Jane Wanniger, did an excellent job of, in the former instance, describing the gendered experience of time in daily routines and showing how “[women's] ages were not men's ages” (102) and, in the latter, evaluating the “probability of pregnancy” (231). The telling of time in Roman court records in the meticulously researched article by Elizabeth S. Cohen neatly demonstrates how women's testimony, and that of men as well, illustrated how a witness could “reconstruct and remember, but often not with a tidy linearity that the judges, and historians, would desire” (132); thus, the gendered element involved here remained obscure.

While virtually every essay in this collection has something interesting, important, and even original to say about the experiences of early modern women (and sometimes also men), the glue of temporality as an organizing principle repeatedly becomes unstuck. The basic concept that time is fungible and its experiential reality varies chronologically and geographically (and, of course, as this volume points out, also in gendered terms) is hardly new, and I would have welcomed a little more acknowledgment of that fact. Keith Thomas raised a similar point in his Religion and the Decline of Magic almost fifty years ago, as did Stephen Kern (for the fin de siècle) in 1983; I looked in vain for any reference to either. Admittedly, neither historian considered gender as a variable, but both emphasized the plasticity and non-linearity of time experiences. In the end, too many essays merely touched on matters of temporality or asserted its significance. Apparently, anything vaguely time-like seemed to warrant inclusion in the book. Most, if not all, of the authors offered scholarly interventions that analyzed how women experienced their bodies and lived their lives, but only some succeeded in showing gender's effects on how people expressed themselves in time, through time, and with time.