Lorna Hutson. Ed. 1999. Feminism & Renaissance Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ix + 480 pp. ISBN 0-19-878244-6. £45.00.

    This excellent collection of important essays illuminates the Renaissance period from a feminist viewpoint. Conventional wisdom has interpreted the Renaissance as a watershed in artistic and intellectual development, marking the inception of the 'modern', in terms of cultural perspectives and practice. Clearly, this holds true in the broadest sense, but the essays in this collection challenge the notion that this innovative period was as liberating for women as it was for men. As Lorna Hutson argues in the Introduction, a close study of the lives of particular women reveals that, far from experiencing the artistic and intellectual liberation and opportunity for expression which we generally associate with the Renaissance, they frequently suffered from increasingly repressive social constraints. This is perhaps most convincingly demonstrated in the discussion of women painters in 'La Donnesca Mano' by Fredrika Jacobs (373-411); and in Lisa Jardine's essay 'Women Humanists: Education for What?' which concerns women who attempted scholarly debate with male mentors (48-81).

  1. I would like to consider these two essays in more detail, because they both draw on well-documented accounts of the experience of particular women in Renaissance Italy. In both essays, analysis of the public literary and artistic output of these women, and indeed its reception, vividly illustrates how women, while theoretically being encouraged to develop their intellectual or artistic talent, were at the same time disadvantaged by the social constraints imposed upon them. Jardine looks at the Nogarola sisters, Isotta and Ginevra, living in fifteenth-century Verona, whose learning was used to advertise the glory of their native city. The humanist Guarino Guarini wrote of Isotta and Ginevra to Jacopo Foscari in 1436:
    Oh the glory indeed of our State and our Age! Oh how rare a bird on earth, like nothing so much as a black swan! If earlier ages had borne these proven virgins, with how many verses would their praises have been sung ... would they not rescue them from the clutches of oblivion ... and preserve them for posterity? (53).

    As Jardine explains, the underlying strategy of this eulogy was to glorify humanism and the city of Verona, not the women themselves. When, encouraged by his fulsome praise of her work, Isotta attempted to engage in scholarly debate with Guarino by writing to him publicly, he publicly snubbed her by not responding, exposing, as Jardine puts it, 'as illusory the notional "equality" and "free scholarly exchange" between them' (54). A similar point is discussed in Joan Kelly's well-known essay, reprinted here, 'Did Women Have a Renaissance?' (21-47) in which she argues that humanist education, although notionally expanding women's experience by introducing them to classical learning, in effect 'spelled a further decline in the lady's influence over courtly society' by placing her under 'male cultural authority'(35). She suggests that the conventions of medieval courtly love which preceded the Renaissance had not been as misogynistic and patriarchal as the classical culture which underpinned the humanist endeavour.

  2. The women painters considered in Fredrika Jacobs's essay were working in a period of burgeoning art criticism which to a large extent laid down parameters for the evaluative mechanisms which still operate today. By studying the work of sixteenth-century art critics, including Giorgio Vasari, whose Lives of the Artists (1568) is still influential today, Jacobs demonstrates that the hierarchy of value judgements which was established in the Renaissance period worked to position the concept of 'feminine' painting style as inferior to the 'masculine'. 'Feminine' painting was characterised as detailed and meticulous, indicating 'timidity and excessive care'; whereas 'masculine' style was typically thought to exhibit 'strength and vigor' (373). Thus as late as 1929, Adolfo Venturi claimed to distinguish Marietta Robusti's work from that of her male relatives by the '"sentimental femininity, a woman's grace that is strained and resolute"' (378) If, occasionally, it was allowed that a woman painter could paint in a 'masculine' way, then she was the 'black swan', the exception who in no way undermined the rule. Women were constrained not only by aesthetic prejudice of this nature, moreover, but by the practical restrictions on their access to life models. Women were not able to paint nudes, so were limited to the study and reproduction of the human form in the work of other painters. This of course could lead to accusations of 'timidity and excessive care' in their work, lacking as they did the opportunity to experiment with their subject matter.

  3. The general constraints on women's activities is the topic of Lorna Hutson's scholarly and interesting discussion of the perceived importance of the domestic sphere for women in the Renaissance, 'The Housewife and the Humanists' (82-105). She argues that this period crystallised 'the prior definition of the household as the non-political sphere to which women were confined' (7), citing the Oeconomicus of Xenophon, and Aristotle's works on household government as important influences on Northern humanists. Disseminated through the works of influential writers such as Erasmus and William Shakespeare, these classical texts presented a picture of the potential of the public and political life for men, in juxtaposition with the domestic role for women, a fallible role which required the art of husbandry to control it: 'this topos of the well-ordering of the wife comes to acquire a special symbolic and political significance' (101). As Hutson concludes, this ideal of Xenophonic husbandry becomes the 'new masculine ideal of the sixteenth century' elevating the educated man to the role of the 'most necessary member for the defence and maintenance of a commonweal' (102), and presumably by definition leaving the woman in the kitchen. The cultural arguments for women to remain within the domestic space were endorsed by medical theories of the period, summarised in Ian Maclean's very comprehensive and useful account of the medical debate about the nature of woman. 'The Notion of Woman in Medicine, Anatomy, and Physiology' (127-155). Although the old Aristotelian model of woman as an underdeveloped man had largely been rejected by the early seventeenth century, she had still not achieved complete equality. The prevailing view was that woman's 'physiology and humours seem to destine her to be the inferior of man, both physically and mentally' (145), ergo in need of a protected domestic environment.

  4. In her essay 'Guilds, Male Bonding and Women's Work in Early Modern Germany' (412-427) Merry Wiesner argues that the relationship between women and household production may have been one of the reasons that journeymen in early modern Germany became increasingly determined to exclude female artisans from membership of the craft guilds. Her rigorous research details many examples of journeymen refusing to admit not only women workers into the guilds, but also men who had worked alongside women, this apparently involving a loss of 'honour' (415). She contends that these gender divisions in the craft guilds had a lasting influence, extending into the ethos of the modern trade union, and indeed in a general sense strengthening the concept of separate spheres of male and female activity.

  5. Interestingly, two of the essays in the collection posit the suggestion that women might use the separate sphere of household and child-rearing to assert a notional power. Lyndal Roper's 'Witchcraft and Fantasy in Early Modern Germany (203-229) demonstrates that the majority of witchcraft accusations that she studied in the seventeenth-century Augsburg witch-trials are brought by women about women, frequently by young mothers about their lying-in maids. She links this to historical factors such as the fear of infertility in a society whose population had been seriously reduced by the Thirty Years' War (221), and a particular idealisation of motherhood in the Baroque society, which led to a high degree of anxiety on the part of young mothers. She concludes that 'The themes of much witchcraft ... are to be found not in a simple sexual antagonism between men and women, but in deeply conflicted feelings about motherhood.'(221). Probematic cultural constructs of women are also at the root of much of the sexual slander litigation fought in early modern London. Laura Gowing's fascinating survey of a number of sexual slander cases in the Church courts, 'Language, Power, and the Law: Women's Slander Litigation in Early Modern London' (428-449) demonstrates that most of the accusations of sexual slander were targeted at women by other women. As Gowing explains, slander was often the culmination of other conflicts, for example over property boundaries or shared resources arising from the rapid growth and shifting population of London in the early seventeenth century (431). That general conflicts should crystallise into sexual slander is a product of the perceived importance within that society of high standards of sexual morality in women, which prompted the language of insult to carry an edge of sexual misconduct. Gowing argues, however, that this responsibility also gave women some agency in policing sexuality 'inside and outside their households ... as much as women were the targets of the regulation of honesty, they made themselves the agents of its definition' (432). In the case of slander allegations, it also provided them with the rare opportunity to participate in an official public situation, to use an 'official, institutional weapon in the daily and occasional conflicts of their local lives' (444).

  6. I have looked closely at only a few of the seventeen excellent essays in this collection. Of those I have not discussed in detail here, I found two on seventeenth-century England particularly interesting, Sharon Achinstein's 'Women on Top in the Pamphlet Literature of the English Revolution' (339-372), which raises the question 'Was the English Revolution an "advance" for women?' (365); and Victoria Kahn's 'Margaret Cavendish and the Romance of Contract' (286-316), in which Kahn skilfully uncovers the political and gender subtext in Cavendish's short prose romance, 'The Contract'.

  7. This collection of essays is particularly valuable in that it combines recent scholarship with the best of the past, providing in one text a comprehensive review of the most challenging interpretations of women's experience of the Renaissance. This text is an invaluable guide for scholars, teachers and students. July 2000
ANNE KELLEY
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