A Renaissance for Renaissance Women?

Joan Kelly's influential article "Did Women Have a Renaissance?" published nearly thirty years ago, challenged the assertion by nineteenth-century historian Jacob Burckhardt, oft-repeated by those that followed him, that women achieved equality with men during the Italian Renaissance. Kelly concluded instead that female opportunities and cultural status in fact declined in the period.¹ Building on the criticisms of Kelly and others, new epistemologies have prompted scholars to ponder whether anyone "had" a Renaissance, and if so, if it merited further scholarly attention.² Yet the five books considered here continue to consciously deploy the terminology of the Renaissance in order to grapple with the intersections of humanism, feminism, politics, patronage, gender, and culture in Italy and Europe during the fourteenth through sixteenth centuries. They attest to a sustained interest in questions of women, power, and creativity across a wide spectrum, from academic monographs to biographies and popular works. According to these authors, at least some women experienced the Renaissance, although in notably different ways than their male counterparts—with choices and challenges unique to their gender. Yet these same women, and others, were also "had" by or became victims of Renaissance ideology.

The substantial thread of humanist thought that has run through Margaret King's distinguished scholarly career is traced in Humanism, Venice and Women, a collection of her essays dating from 1975 to 2003. Although women and gender are not the primary focus of many of her earlier essays, these works do testify to the centrality of the family in humanist discourse. As she observes, Venetian humanists Giovanni Caldiera and Francesco and Ermolao Barbaro, among others, viewed the family as a microcosm of the state and thus accorded it considerable attention, as does King, whose notes document a vast bibliography of humanist treatises on the family. These humanists, perhaps unsurprisingly, granted women fairly narrow influence largely within the family: categorizing women by their sexual role, male intellectuals urged obedience and virtue, and championed marriage and procreation as the primary duties of women.

However, the third section of King's essays amply demonstrates the distance between humanist ideals and reality, focusing on those women who challenged patriarchal limitations through pursuit of study and in humanist writings. As King observes in her preface, it was the very dearth of female humanists evidenced in her early studies that led her to search them out (viii). What King found gels well with Kelly's interpretation; although some women received a humanist education alongside men, what they were able to do with that education was severely curtailed. King's examination of the restricted careers of female humanists including Isotta and Ginevra Nogarola, Cassandra Fedele, and Laura Cereta suggests that the possession of such an education may have led to additional difficulties. These young women had the free time to devote to study, but like all elite females, despite their intellect or because of it, they eventually faced pressure to marry or enter convents. Those who chose the former, including Ginevra Nogarola and Fedele, abandoned their scholarship (or at least their writing) in favor of the wifehood and motherhood championed by their male humanist counterparts until widowhood granted them the freedom to return to their studies.

In her most recent essay reproduced here, King considers the influence such "Mothers of the Renaissance" may have exercised on their sons...