Renaissance

In the medieval period, few women described women's lives; mostly, the record was written by men, expressing men's perception. In The Canterbury Tales, Chaucer's Wife of Bath in looks at a picture of a lion defeated and asks a rhetorical question, "Who painted the lion?" If the lion—or the woman—were to tell the story, it would look very different. The pattern of misogyny this question registers, which characterized the Renaissance as well as the Middle Ages, was backed by ecclesiastical authority and founded in attitudes towards women in texts by biblical and patristic authors. St. Paul affirmed women are inferior beings, to be endured for procreative reasons; the theologian Tertullian argued that a woman was "a temple built over a sewer" and "the gateway to the devil." In effect, women are either the occasion of temptation and pollution, like Eve, or the embodiment of virtue and purity, like the Virgin Mary. Such symbolic figures supported a great many of the disciplinary practices that regulated women's moral lives and their relationships with men.

Women were characterized and largely controlled not in relation to their natural capacities (although medical tradition conceived of women as imperfect men, by nature incapable of higher-level thought and rationality), but according to a set of views that denied they were capable of entering fully into human culture, other than the culture of the household or family. By 1400 core beliefs about women's roles, centered on their common experience as wife, mother, or daughter, had been elaborated in pastoral texts and pedagogical literature, constructing a gender typology defining women in relation to marital status: unmarried, wife, widow. This three-fold division was extraordinarily tenacious, dominating the medieval and Renaissance centuries, classifying women on the basis of sexuality (chastity being taken as the supreme spiritual virtue) and largely ignoring social categories that were crucial to the representation of male experience.

Despite the general cultural silence to which women were consigned, the turn of the fifteenth century saw the emergence of an author, in whom women found the voice Chaucer's Wife missed: Christine de Pisan (1363–1431), sometimes called Europe's first feminist. Widowed, she supported herself and children as, in effect, the first female professional writer. Her most notable work, La cité des dames, promoted women and their virtues and resisted male assault. Pisan here participated in the contemporary querelle des femmes, offering a visionary society of "women worthies" in demonstration of women's excellence. Nevertheless, her city of ladies affirmed virtues that were accredited by tradition as well as Church-sponsored belief: chastity, humility, and feminine decorum. Furthermore, in line with a typical history, for all her contemporary impact her work was soon out of circulation, only reemerging in the twentieth century.

At law, women were generally subordinated to male authority and their property taken into men's hands. Law, then, was both gendered theory and its practical instrument. Insistence upon the importance of marriage contributed to women's exclusion from public life, since, subject to her husband, she could not be trusted to act independently; in many areas of Europe, indeed, she could not be personally sued or charged with a crime, and, correlatively, needed her husband's approval to go to law. Dower and the limited property freedoms of the widow served to protect women's independence to some degree; city law codes could even allow married women to define themselves for commercial purposes as femme sole, entitling them to enter into contracts; but such independence was constantly under attack through the course of the Renaissance. If women were always accorded secondary status at law, the larger European movement toward assimilation of local codes to Roman Law confirmed a woman's lack of legal responsibility. This pattern of restriction extended into women's commercial life. Women had dominated many areas of commercial activity (city markets in Poland, for instance), and productive labor early in the period, but progressively lost their few rights in organizations like craft guilds that normally consolidated and defended the rights of the productive classes.

Despite legal limitations, many women, like Elizabeth I (r. 1558–1603) and Margaret of Navarre (1492–1549), won renown as great political leaders. In general, however, women occupied positions of power that accrued to the household, as the heads of great secular or religious estates, or informally through their proximity to great men in royal and aristocratic courts. Although high-born women were not taught in the language of the church and higher education—Latin—a surprising number received an education in the classics, like their brothers. The training that marked the upbringing of women like Elizabeth I was a positive consequence of humanist ideas (promoted by scholars like Erasmus [1469–1536] and Juan Luis Vives [1492–1540]) which insisted that sexes were "equally suited for knowledge of learning by which reason is cultivated," as Sir Thomas More (1478–1535) maintained.

If many women were educated to a degree, their education was of a practical nature to assist in managing household business, including, in pious households, the reading of devotions written with women in mind. On the whole, women's capacity to read far exceeded their capacity to write; vigorous family politicians like the Paston wives—especially the matriarchs, Agnes (1405–1479), Margaret (1420–1484), and Margery Brews (d.1495)—read and composed the letters that passed through their households, but seldom even signed letters written in their names. In this area, as in others, a woman's success tended to distinguish her from her sex, making her more like a man. Jean de Gerson (1363–1429), Chancellor of the University of Paris, called Christine de Pisan insignis femina, virilis femina; the same could be said of a great political figure like Elizabeth I, who fused to her man-like capacity for learning a public virility in the face of national enemies, paradoxically conjoined with a triumphant virginity that suggested she was the bride of her people.

Many aristocratic women were significant patrons of learning and the learned, writers, painters, and the arts. On the whole, however, women were urged to be submissive and modest in their relations to men. When women wrote, their writing tended to be modestly minor, confined to specific, gender-determined modes and topics: spiritual autobiography, epitaphs, panegyrics, moral and family life. In general, then, silence was the rule and a woman wrote freely only where, because of the character and scale of her household (whether religious or secular), she was guaranteed an audience. One should not forget, however, Louise Labé's (c. 1525–1566) firm resolve: "And if any woman becomes so proficient as to be able to write down her thoughts, let her do so, and not despise the honour, but rather flaunt it instead of fine clothes, necklaces and rings."

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Davis, Natalie Zemon, and Arlette Farge, eds. 1993. A History of Women in the West: Renaissance and Enlightenment Paradoxes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Jardine, Lisa. 1983. Still Harping on Daughters: Women and Drama in the Age of Shakespeare. Sussex, UK: Harvester Press.

Wiesner, Merry E. 2000. Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe. 2nd edition. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Wilson, Katharina M., ed. 1987. Women Writers of the Renaissance and Reformation. Athens: University of Georgia Press.

Woodbridge, Linda. 1984. Women and the English Renaissance: Literature and the Nature of Womankind, 1540–1620. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

                                         Claudia Marquis