Creating Women: Representation, Self-Representation, and Agency in the Renaissance ed. Manuela Scarci (review)

Since the era of Ruth Kelso’s Doctrine for the Lady of the Renaissance (1956), and in the wake of first- and second-wave feminisms, an enormous amount of scholarship has been devoted to the study of Renaissance treatises that dictated strictures and behaviours for the governance and self-governance of women. Most of this literature was, of course, written by men and was both proscriptive and exclusive, directed to that minority of women whose behaviour, by virtue of aristocratic birth, association, or, somewhat later, social elevation through the rise of the merchant class, was a matter of scrutiny and interest. Courtesy books for both sexes tell us a great deal about a very few people. Nevertheless, many historians have addressed such literature as though it were normative and have attempted to confirm or confute their content on that basis, rather than assuming that such compendia are, at best, useful fictions and hardly representative of any social reality. Such writing did, however, have the potential to serve as a vehicle for women’s self-fashioning and adaptation in the increasingly polemical world of post-Reformation Europe. Thus, the essays in this collection explore the notion of “creating women” in the paradigmatic ways that literature allows.

The essays, wide-ranging in temporal and geographical terms, are divided into four sections: “Women and Their Fictions,” “Women and Their Writings,” “Women and Their Bodies,” and “Women and Their Agency,” thus travelling from strategies of distancing to strategies of embodied action in the creation of their identities. In the first section, Jean-Philippe Beaulieu writes about women polemicists of France who adopted the persona of Joan of Arc, pleading humble origins and divine inspiration, in their efforts to win a public political voice, creating a new type of female modesty that, rather than being silent, could claim its own voice. Many of the essays deal with this same modelling of “authorial ethos,” in which women writers self-consciously adopted various forms of self-modulation in order to be heard and to be accorded authority. Renee-Claude Breitenstein examines the partnership of the brother and sister Georges and Madeleine de Scudéry in their volumes of Les Femmes Illustres, in which they created new voices for their heroines by giving each an oration to recite, allowing them to appropriate agency in the telling of their own lives. Various forms of writing are also considered in the context of this self-creation; Jane Couchman writes about the models that Huguenot noblewomen adopted in their letters to speak to their own emancipation in the context of the Reformed Church in France. The Reformation created a new sense of identity for women in terms of their freedom to exercise a personal faith and to develop an individual relationship with God. This emphasis on personal freedom created new potentials for women’s agency, inciting women to develop strategies that permitted their engagement in public political discourse. Bodies, always troubling for women’s history, are dealt with in essays that construct women in the context of binary relationships with other bodies: as wives in Spain, as midwives in France, and in the relations of confessing nuns to their confessors, again in Spain. It is notable that although the essays traverse a wide terrain of women and experiences, the final section on women’s agency ends with an essay by Francesco Divenuto entitled “The Role of Queen Maria Amalia of Saxony in the Planning of the Royal Palace of Caserta,” ending with the standard trope of nobility and privilege that started the engine that still drives the study of “women” in the Renaissance.

All of the essays are well crafted and interesting. They do, however, all seem to proceed on the postmodern premise that identities and gender are constructs and, more important, that such constructs can be fixed in histories that are much more complex and fluid than such “self-fashioning” impulses might allow. Any study...