Exile, the loss of homeland through compulsion or choice, has confronted women from prehistory to the present day. Women in exile in early modern Europe and the Americas analyses the important but largely untold stories of women exiles of diverse status, origin, and political and religious outlook between 1492 and 1790. They include Jewish women expelled from Spain, Indigenous women enslaved and taken to Europe, British indentured women crossing the Atlantic, and enslaved African women transported to the Americas. Religious and political upheavals of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries created other exiles: Huguenot women went to the Netherlands and England, English royalists left for the Netherlands and France, while English radicals went to the continent and North America. Women in exile explores how these women faced life-changing questions of whether and where to go, and how to create a new life in a new home, and shows how women's crucial efforts to turn to religious, political and family networks were not always met with success. Whether poor or royal, their financial circumstances remained precarious. Drawing on rich primary sources, chapters capture women's narratives of exile. In many ways, the experience of exile could become a constitutive element of identity and agency, shaping how these women viewed themselves and how they were viewed by others.

This volume not only provides a new vantage point from which to enrich the study of exile but also contributes significant new scholarship to the history of women.