Women's Writing in Italy, 1400–1650

Introduction

introduction Did women have a renaissance? In the three decades since Joan Kelly posed this question in her now classic essay of that title, an immense volume of work has been devoted to examining the position of women in the cultural era to which the slippery but convenient chronological label of “Renaissance ” still clings.1 This recent work has added vastly to our knowledge of the lives women lived in this period and the social, cultural, and economic factors that constrained and occasionally empowered them. Noblewomen, queens, working women, courtesans, nuns, and saints have all, to varying extents, been the object of meticulous scrutiny, as have the differing possibilities for female agency offered by different geopolitical and social environments , from the courts, cities, and convents of Catholic Italy to the country houses and market towns of Protestant England and Germany.2 Much work has focused on women’s status in the family, their legal position , and their educational opportunities; much, too, on their role as patrons and consumers and producers of culture. At the same time, attitudes to women—and, more broadly, to sex and gender—have been the subject of an intense and increasingly sophisticated analysis that has revealed ever more clearly the complexity of the role gender plays in the construction of identities, from the individual to the civic to the national.3 Although the very copiousness of recent work on women can be daunting, we are undoubtedly now, as a result of the endeavors of the past few decades, in a better position to answer Kelly’s question than she was at the time she asked it. While it would be unfair to claim that attention to women’s history is an exclusively modern phenomenon, as that would neglect the considerable achievements of earlier scholars in this area, it is unquestionably true that our level of expertise in this field has been quantitatively and qualitatively immeasurably enhanced.4 So, did women have a renaissance? The question is a complex one, and any answer must be correspondingly nuanced: perhaps more so than that of Kelly herself, who replies to her own query with an emphatic negative. Kelly’s central point, trenchantly argued, is that the period from around the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries in Europe saw a significant reduction of opportunities for women. Specifically, within the upper strata of society , on which Kelly focuses, changes in inheritance patterns and configurations of political power are presented as having conspired to restrict elite xi women’s economic, social, and cultural agency. Kelly takes as paradigmatic here the contrasted figures of the medieval feudal chatelaine and the Renaissance court lady, arguing that, where the former had often wielded considerable power, whether ruling in her own right or in proxy for a husband who might be absent for periods of years, the latter, sidelined by patrilineal inheritance practices and blessed or cursed by a typically more sedentary spouse, found herself increasingly corralled into the subordinate and largely decorative role of dynastic consort. More generally, both within these exalted circles and beyond them—for example, in the bourgeois elite of mercantile cities like Florence—Kelly sees the division of gender roles becoming more marked in this period, with the public sphere being increasingly demarcated as male, the domestic as female. This was culturally reflected in a prescriptive literature that delineated increasingly sharply dichotomized ideals of male and female behavior, the male defined by the active virtues of leadership and intellectual vigor, the female by docility and obedience. Kelly concludes that the very social and political forces that are often seen as heralds of modernity in this period—the decline of feudalism, the development of mercantile protocapitalist economies , the emergence of the nation-state in much of Europe—may be seen as having worked in many ways to the detriment of women. Thus, seen from the perspective of women’s history, the teleological narrative underlying the notion of the Renaissance is inverted in that a greater enlightenment is apparent the more nearly the “dark ages” are approached. To what extent has Kelly’s pessimistic vision of women’s history in the transition from medieval to early modern Europe been borne out by subsequent research? The results are, perhaps inevitably, mixed.5 While Kelly focuses near exclusively on secular women of the nobility and relies—to a contentious extent—on literary evidence to prove her thesis, her analysis ultimately takes as its starting point a broader tradition within the Marxistin...