Women's Roles in the Renaissance

Women's Roles in the Renaissance PDF

Author: Meg L. Brown

Publisher: Greenwood

Published: 2005-07-30

Total Pages: 390

ISBN-13:

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The story of the Renaissance has usually been told through the elite male perspective. Here, the lives of women and girls from a wide range of classes, religions, and countries in Europe take center stage. Women had a significant impact on the economy, social structures, and the culture of the Renaissance, despite the constraints on their exercise of power, lack of opportunities, and enforced dependence. This book examines the attitudes and practices that shaped the varied roles of women then, but also the important ways women shaped the world in which they lived. The focus is on both the ideas that circulated about women and on the difference between representations of them and their everyday life experiences. The narrative draws from a wide variety of sources on every aspect of women's lives: education, the law, work, politics, religion, literature, the arts, and pleasures. Numerous women are profiled, and many period illustrations are included.--From publisher description.

Women of the Renaissance

Women of the Renaissance PDF

Author: Margaret L. King

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2008-04-10

Total Pages: 351

ISBN-13: 0226436160

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In this informative and lively volume, Margaret L. King synthesizes a large body of literature on the condition of western European women in the Renaissance centuries (1350-1650), crafting a much-needed and unified overview of women's experience in Renaissance society. Utilizing the perspectives of social, church, and intellectual history, King looks at women of all classes, in both usual and unusual settings. She first describes the familial roles filled by most women of the day—as mothers, daughters, wives, widows, and workers. She turns then to that significant fraction of women in, and acted upon, by the church: nuns, uncloistered holy women, saints, heretics, reformers,and witches, devoting special attention to the social and economic independence monastic life afforded them. The lives of exceptional women, those warriors, queens, patronesses, scholars, and visionaries who found some other place in society for their energies and strivings, are explored, with consideration given to the works and writings of those first protesting female subordination: the French Christine de Pizan, the Italian Modesta da Pozzo, the English Mary Astell. Of interest to students of European history and women's studies, King's volume will also appeal to general readers seeking an informative, engaging entrance into the Renaissance period.

Women Writers of the Renaissance and Reformation

Women Writers of the Renaissance and Reformation PDF

Author: Katharina M. Wilson

Publisher: University of Georgia Press

Published: 1987

Total Pages: 692

ISBN-13: 9780820308654

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The dawn of humanism in the Renaissance presented privileged women with great opportunities for personal and intellectual growth. Sexual and social roles still determined the extent to which a woman could pursue education and intellectual accomplishment, but it was possible through the composition of poetry or prose to temporarily offset hierarchies of gender, to become equal to men in the act of creation. Edited by Katharina M. Wilson, this anthology introduces the works of twenty-five women writers of the Renaissance and Reformation, among them Marie Dentière, a Swiss evangelical reformer whose writings were so successful they were banned during her lifetime; Gaspara Stampa, a cultivated courtesan of Venetian aristocratic circles who wrote lyric poetry that has earned her comparisons to Michelangelo and Tasso; Hélisenne de Crenne, a French aristocrat who embodied the true spirit of the Renaissance feminist, writing both as novelist and as champion of her sex; Helene Kottanner, Austrian chambermaid to Queen Elizabeth of Hungary whose memoirs recall her daring theft of the Holy Crown of Saint Stephen for her esteemed mistress; and Lady Mary Sidney Wroth, the first Englishwoman known to write a full-length work of fiction and compose a significant body of secular poetry. Offering a seldom seen counterpoint to literature written by men, Women Writers of the Renaissance and Reformation presents prose and poetry that have never before appeared in English, as well as writings that have rarely been available to the nonspecialist. The women whose writings are included here are united by a keen awareness of the social limitations placed upon their creative potential, of the strained relationship between their gender and their work. This concern invests their writings with a distinctive voice--one that carries the echoes of a male aesthetic while boldly declaring battle against it.

Encyclopedia of Women in the Renaissance

Encyclopedia of Women in the Renaissance PDF

Author: Anne R. Larsen

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2007-03-01

Total Pages: 480

ISBN-13: 1851097775

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This work is a revealing combination of biographies and topical essays that describe the outstanding and often-overlooked contributions of women to the science, politics, and culture of the Renaissance. Encyclopedia of Women in the Renaissance: Italy, France, and England is the first first comprehensive reference devoted exclusively to the contributions of women to European culture in the period between 1350 and 1700. Focusing principally on early modern women in England, France, and Italy, it offers over 135 biographies of the extraordinary women of those times. Encyclopedia of Women in the Renaissance provides vivid portraits of well known women such as Catherine of Siena, Joan of Arc, Mary Queen of Scots, and Christine de Pizan. Also included are less familiar but equally important women like Elena Lucrezia Cornaro, the first woman in Europe to earn a doctorate; the renowned Renaissance painter Artemisia Gentileschi; and the acclaimed author of medical textbooks and midwife to a French queen, Louise Boursier. Based on the latest research and enhanced with thematic essays, this groundbreaking work casts our understanding of women's lives and roles in Renaissance history and culture in a provocative new light.

Women as Sites of Culture

Women as Sites of Culture PDF

Author: Susan Shifrin

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-03-02

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 1351872052

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Exploring the ways in which women have formed and defined expressions of culture in a range of geographical, political, and historical settings, this collection of essays examines women's figurative and literal roles as "sites" of culture from the 16th century to the present day. The diversity of chronological, geographical and cultural subjects investigated by the contributors-from the 16th century to the 20th, from Renaissance Italy to Puritan Boston to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth to post-war Japan, from parliamentary politics to the politics of representation-provides a range of historical outlooks. The collection brings an unusual variety of methodological approaches to the project of discovering intersections among women's studies, literary studies, cultural studies, history, and art history, and expands beyond the Anglo- and Eurocentric focus often found in other works in the field. The volume presents an in-depth, investigative study of a tightly-constructed set of crucial themes, including that of the female body as a governing trope in political and cultural discourses; the roles played by women and notions of womanhood in redefining traditions of ceremony, theatricality and spectacle; women's iconographies and personal spaces as resources that have shaped cultural transactions and evolutions; and finally, women's voices-speaking and writing, both-as authors of cultural record and destiny. Throughout the volume the themes are refracted chronologically, geographically, and disciplinarily as a means to deeper understanding of their content and contexts. Women as Sites of Culture represents a productive collaboration of historians from various disciplines in coherently addressing issues revolving around the roles of gender, text, and image in a range of cultures and periods.

Women, History, and Theory

Women, History, and Theory PDF

Author: Joan Kelly

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2014-01-30

Total Pages: 190

ISBN-13: 0226430294

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These posthumous essays by Joan Kelly, a founder of women's studies, represent a profound synthesis of feminist theory and historical analysis and require a realignment of perspectives on women in society from the Middle Ages to the present.

Forgotten Healers

Forgotten Healers PDF

Author: Sharon T. Strocchia

Publisher: I Tatti Studies in Italian Ren

Published: 2019

Total Pages: 353

ISBN-13: 0674241746

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In Renaissance Italy women from all walks of life played a central role in health care and the early development of medical science. Observing that the frontlines of care are often found in the household and other spaces thought of as female, Sharon Strocchia encourages us to rethink women's place in the history of medicine.

Gender and Society in Renaissance Italy

Gender and Society in Renaissance Italy PDF

Author: Judith C. Brown

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2014-09-25

Total Pages: 268

ISBN-13: 1317886585

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This major new collection of essays by leading scholars of Renaissance Italy transforms many of our existing notions about Renaissance politics, economy, social life, religion, medicine, and art. All the essays are founded on original archival research and examine questions within a wide chronological and geographical framework - in fact the pan-Italian scope of the volume is one of the volume's many attractions.Gender and Society in Renaissance Italy provides a broad, comprehensive perspective on the central role that gender concepts played in Italian Renaissance society.

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