Women's Writing Before Woolf: A Social Reference/Bieses: Bibliografía de Escritoras Españolas

Background

BIESES is an acronym for Bibliografía de Escritoras Españolas which translates in English to Bibliography of Spanish Women Writers. In 2004 the project was founded to act as an up-to-date database focused on women writers from the Middle Ages to 1800. BIESES is a tool for researchers with a focus in the fields of Spanish medieval literature, early modern literature and women’s history, allowing vital access and advancement of the knowledge surrounding Hispanic women in literature and cultural production.

Up until the creation of BIESES there was very little information or databases that covered the literary content of Spanish writers. The project was born from the necessity to know who studied and edited works prior to the 19th century, as it was necessary to know in order to present all information as quality research. Today BIESES studies the prevalence of female writers during this time and provides paratexts of their printed works and subsequent bibliographies for their works.

“How many were there in total? Who were they? What social or biographical profile did they have? Where did they live? How much did they write? What kinds of plays did they write? Where were they published? Who read them?” – The Foundational Questions of BIESES

People

The project is made up of Basic Research Team with researchers from different centres, all of them experts in Spanish literature, language and history and all of them having been the author to a number of published pieces and papers. There are two head coordinators of the project, Maria Martos; a Titular teacher with the Department of Spanish Literature and Literature Theory at the Universidad Nacional de Educacion a Distancia (UNED) in Madrid, and Nieves Baranda; a Professor of Spanish Literature at the Universidad Nacional de Educacion a Distancia (UNED) in Madrid. Along with these two coordinators, the project also includes nine current team members, including Professors and Doctors and one hired postdoctoral staff member. In addition, BIESES lists eleven former members involved in the project, ranging from predoctoral researchers to museum curators, all detailed in an extensive list which can be found on the projects credits page. Although not listed on the projects site, there are a number of other researchers who are welcomed in the involvement of BIESES. As the project is quite large and ambitious, there is a lot of opportunity for contribution from outside sources which will then be referenced by a team. Collaboration with BIESES could involve sending in information about courses, seminars and congresses that involve and encourage Spanish women writers. This collaboration is then put towards a consultation with the team coordinator and is then processed with any of the information related to the time period within the database.

List of Current Members

• Pedro Alvarez Cifuentes (Contracted Professor Doctor, Department of Classical and Romance Philology, University of Oviedo)
• Vanda Anastácio (Professor for Portuguese Literature and Culture, University of Lisbon)
• Anne J. Cruz (Professor of Spanish Emerita, Modern Languages and Literatures, University of Miami)
• Catherine M. Jaffe (Professor of Spanish Literature, Department of World Languages and Literatures, Texas State University)
• Laura Malo Barranco (Associate Professor, Faculty of Philosophy and Letters, Zaragoza's University)
• Ana Martinez Pereira (Contracted Professor Doctor, Faculty of Philology, Complutense University of Madrid)
• Immaculate Osuna (Titular teacher, Faculty of Philology, Complutense University of Madrid)
• Jacobo Sanz Hermida (Professor of University School, University of Salamanca)
• Verònica Zaragoza (Assistant Doctor, Department of Theory of Languages and Communication Sciences, Area of Theory of Literature, University of Valencia)
• Gabriela Martínez Pérez (Research Personnel in Training (MINECO), Department of Spanish Literature and Literature Theory, Faculty of Philology, UNED)

Works

Since its conception in 2004, BIESES and its team of researchers have curated its archival database to include a culmination of over 11,000 primary and secondary works referring to Spanish women writers in the period between the Middle Ages and 1800. All these materials can be searched in the database using the names of the authors, the titles of the works and the secondary sources as well as individualised poems from first verses, letters, legal documents, contemporary mentions, studies, translations, etc. Using these key terms and ideas will help readers find the works of collaborators on BIESES.

Some of the involved works include:

• Audio visual content.
• Bibliographies.
• Digitised editions of works.
• Authors texts.
• Studies in PDF form.
• Didactic resources.

Today, BIESES focuses on Spanish women writers of the specified period in the literary field through the knowledge and information gathered from paratexts of their original works. An extensive list of all authors held in the database can be found on the projects “Authors from the threshold” page or can be filtered through the projects “Paratext Finder”.

Reputation and Legacy

Manuel Serrano y Sanz’s Notes for a Library of Spanish Writers from the year 1401 to 1833 was the invaluable catalogue that acted as a foundation to investigations for the conception of BIESES. However, since it was published in 1905, BIESES has now subjected the original list to revisions prompted by the discovery of new and lost texts, contemporary studies and theoretic authors, as well as corrections to discovered errors, all of which have been integrated into the BIESES database.

The BIESES Project’s objective is to document research on Spanish women writers prior to 1800, answering the questions of how many they were, who they were, what social or biographical profile they had, where they lived, how much they wrote, what types of works, where they were published how they were spread and who read them. The project aims to promote and encourage high quality research as well as modern editions in a bibliographic catalogue. This catalogue has been designed with the aim to provide users with a tool that they can use to search multiple studies and fields and encouraging the engagement of the readers with the context behind the readings. Today BIESES uses secondary resources to provide quality research based on digital publishing and analysis of the paratexts that are available from the authors, in order to develop an understanding of the authors opinions, evaluations and prejudices. This conceptual system has been developed, and others such as TEI (Textual Encoding Initiative), to ensure that all the relevant and necessary categories are able to be traced from a beginning point from a singular search tool and are able to be studied and dissected in a way that is appropriate and also provides the biggest advantage to the researchers.

BIESES also holds conferences, both in person and virtually, in which they identify certain works and research tasks that are available to world due to the BIESES project. These conferences are held regularly and provide the public with the ability to sign up to receive updates and newsletters informing the public of when the next conference/update it going to be made available. The latest international virtual conference was held on the 23rd of April 2021 where BIESES discussed in several, the international congress "Captive Discourses: Woman, Writing and Seclusion".

References

1. BIESES. "BIESES: Bibliografía de escritoras españolas: [Bibliography of Spanish Women Writers]." Meet BIESES: What is Bieses? Retrieved from https://www.bieses.net/que-es- bieses/
2. BIESES. "BIESES: Bibliografía de escritoras españolas: [Bibliography of Spanish Women Writers]." Meet BIESES: Objectives of the Project. Retrieved from https://www.bieses.net/objetivos-del-proyecto/
3. BIESES. "BIESES: Bibliografía de escritoras españolas: [Bibliography of Spanish Women Writers]." Meet BIESES: About us. Retrieved from https://www.bieses.net/quienes-somos/
4. Bultman, Dana. "BIESES: Bibliografía de escritoras españolas: [Bibliography of Spanish Women Writers]." Early Modern Women, vol. 11 no. 2, 2017, p. 130-133. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/emw.2017.0009.
5. Weber, A. (2018). The Routledge Research Companion to Early Modern Spanish Women Writers ed. by Nieves Baranda and Anne J. Cruz. Early Modern Women, 13(1), 172-175.

Further readings:

BIESES. "BIESES: Bibliografía de escritoras españolas: [Bibliography of Spanish Women Writers]." BIESES Project: List of Authors, https://www.bieses.net/lista-de-autoras/

BIESES. "BIESES: Bibliografía de escritoras españolas: [Bibliography of Spanish Women Writers]." BIESES Project: Paratext Finder, https://www.bieses.net/buscador.php

Bultman, D. (2017). BIESES: Bibliografía de escritoras españolas [Bibliography of Spanish Women Writers] www. bieses. net.

Project of Indian Studies. (2021). Bibliografía de escritoras españolas. http://estudiosindianos.org/en/links/bibliografia-de-escritoras-espanolas-bieses/

Weber, A. (2018). The Routledge Research Companion to Early Modern Spanish Women Writers ed. by Nieves Baranda and Anne J. Cruz. Early Modern Women, 13(1), 172-175.

Wikipedia. (2021) Text Encoding Initiative. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Text_Encoding_Initiative

Wikipedia. (2021). Manuel Serrano y Sanz. https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manuel_Serrano_y_Sanz