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"Let us imagine a space for where femmes savantes might speak freely about politics with politicians, art with artists, gentility with gentlemen, and even the theory and practice of domesticity 0f they so chose.'" "Republican Court-the focus of society for the new governing class." "Such an institution did exist. . . ."In a series of conference papers delivered in the mid-1990s to the early 2000s, Fredrika J. Teute and David S. Shields performed an act of historical recovery in front of an audience of early Amer ican historians. The papers were a signal contribution to scholars seeking to gauge women's role in early national politics and public life. Ranging across methodological, geographical, and disciplinary boundaries, they opened new vistas by moving beyond the public/private dichotomy that had implicitly structured much historical analysis.1Teute and Shields intervened in a conversation then burgeoning about the relevance of the Habemiasian public sphere for early Americanists, locating the oft-diffuse concept in time and space. Focusing on the national capital's "Republican Court" between the last decade of the eighteenth centuiy and the first decade of the nineteenth, they showed that it was a site-and a very material one at that-where women played a central role. Teute and Shields did not stop with that notable contribution, however. They further reinterpreted Jefferson's presidency from the perspective of the Republican Court as regress rather than progress- anticipating a good deal of scholarship that would similarly break from lingering dispositions inherited from the Progressive historians. They provided a model of creative interdisciplinary collaboration that married archival work, close reading, and deep-cultural contextualization. In drawing their inspiration, they looked not just across the Atlantic to Gemian sociology and French history; they looked back to a forgotten historiography from the mid-nineteenth centuiy, and showed that it knew something most historians in the 1990s did not. And, not least, Shields and Teute showed that such a collaboration, and the salons of the early republic themselves, could best be reintroduced through the performances of their papers as a dialogue-marrying form and argument in an academic paper.Perhaps in part because of their performative dimensions, the papers were never published. Instead, they circulated in the manner of eighteenth-century manuscripts, through private networks of friendship, conversation, and correspondence. For unpublished papers, they had a remarkable influence; references to the papers lie scatted across books and articles published in the first decade of the twenty-first centuiy. For papers that were written twenty years ago, they remain remarkably fresh. They are, of course, anchored in their historiographical moment, but they continue to speak to contemporary issues in the scholarship: the state of feminist historiography; the reevaluation of Federalist-era politics; the opening of early American history toward more international historiographies; a tum to more material history approaches to the past; the engagement with theater and performance studies; and a recent inward turn toward emotions, sensibility, and novelistic approaches to the past. … |
