International Egodocumental Network Seminar 1/2025
The first online seminar of the International Egodocumental Network in 2025 will be conducted on 5 May 2025 at 17.00 (Warsaw time). The Lecturer will be Sylvie Moret Petrini (University of Lausanne), presenting the paper entitled Presentation of the Project Lost Female Diaries (17th-19th Centuries).
If you want to attend the seminar, please get in touch with us by email at egodocuments@umk.pl.
Below you can find the abstract and information about the Lecturer.
Abstract:
In recent years, researchers and archive professionals have been working hard to highlight the importance of women's written heritage, which is naturally a crucial step toward a more balanced and critical historical perspective in terms of gender. The database project Lost Female Diaries (17th–19th Centuries), which I want to further develop and present at this conference, is part of this effort.
By combining the material history of archives with a gender-based approach, this project seeks to investigate the preservation of women's diaries in Europe from a new perspective. It will not only examine what has been preserved but also what has disappeared. Starting from the observation that keeping a personal diary has long been a shared social practice, the project is based on the hypothesis that contemporary testimonies—what we call "peripheral writings"—can help provide clues about lost texts. This hypothesis arises from the observation that, for a very long time, the diaries were not necessarily intimate or secret. They were often read by acquaintances, commented on, or even partially or entirely copied.
Furthermore, this project aims to explore the possible reasons of the later destructions and disappearances of these writings, bringing attention to texts that have survived only as published excerpts in the works of historians over the past two centuries.
In the first phase of the project, which has already started in Switzerland, we gathered information in a database. We now wish to expand the project on a larger scale and transform this database into a shared tool, allowing researchers to contribute by reporting similar writings they discover in their own research. This would significantly expand the record of women's diaries and enhance our understanding of personal writing practices, the relationship of women writers to these practices, and family and public archiving culture.
About the Lecturer:
Sylvie Moret Petrini (ORCID : 0000-0001-5639-1571) is a lecturer in Early Modern History at the University of Lausanne and a scientific manager of the Swiss Egodocuments Database (www.egodocuments.ch). During her PhD, she studied domestic practices of education. Her research was based on the rich Swiss Family archive, which contained a large number of different egodocuments. She contextualized the birth and developpement of educational diaries across different regions and analysed their contribution to the history of the training of both male and female elites.
An important part of her research on the field of egodocuments focuses on children's and youth's personal writings (diaries and correspondence). This form of history, from a child's point of view, has proven to be highly significant. It puts the spotlight on individuals who were seeking visibility and allows an exploration of their agency. Her work places a particular emphasis on female "voices" working on a large corpus of women's diaries. Among her publications and editions related to this field: L’enfance sous la plume : La diffusion de l’écriture éducative en Suisse romande, 1750-1820, PUR, 2022 (https://books.openedition.org/pur/159297?lang=fr) ; « Child-Rearing and Domestic Education in the 18th century elites », in Joachim Eibach and Margareth Lanzinger (eds), The Routledge History of Domestic Sphere in Europe (16th to 19th century), Routledge, 2020 ; Moret Petrini Sylvie et Lanz Anne-Marie (éds), « Il faut que vous deveniez un homme ». Correspondance échangée entre Catherine de Charrière de Sévery et son fils Wilhelm, pensionnaire à Colmar (1780-1783), Antipodes, 2021, « Entre passé et avenir ? Le temps de la jeunesse dans les journaux des jeunes gens au XVIIIe siècle », Annales de démographie historique, 2023.