Gendered Dialogues Reframing the Renaissance through the study of women BY MICHAEL P. BREEN AND DANA E. KATZ
Historian Joan Kelly-Gadol famously asked, “Did women have a Renaissance?” This question frames Hum 211/212’s engagement with gender in late medieval and early modern European art, literature, politics, and culture. Renaissance Europeans were highly attuned to gender, which profoundly shaped societal hierarchies and norms. Women’s lives were usually defined by their roles as daughters and wives, and legal restrictions constrained their ability to control property or act without the approval of a male guardian. Some women enjoyed access to educational, economic, and political opportunities, though often not those available to men. Contemporary medical and religious doctrines asserted that women were driven by their physical desires and prone to irrationality (traits that made them especially vulnerable to Satan’s lures), which further entrenched misogyny. Even virtues were gendered. Men were praised for courage, wisdom, and power, while women—even female rulers—tended to win renown for their piety, chastity, modesty, and obedience. Gender permeated late medieval and early modern European culture. Niccolò Machiavelli’s political vision, for instance, was explicitly masculine. A famous passage in his seminal treatise The Prince describes how a leader with virtù (vir, man in Latin) could use boldness, strength, and calculation to prepare for the onslaughts of the unpredictable (and feminine) fortuna. On the other hand, Baldassare Castiglione, an Italian courtier, described the power women held at court in their promotion of civility, decorum, and sprezzatura, or studied nonchalance. The authority wielded by figures such as the Duchess Elisabetta Gonzaga and her companion Emilia Pia at the court of Urbino tempered and restrained the aggression of male courtiers. Marriage, meanwhile, served as a potent religious and political
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In The Chess Game (1555), painter Sofonisba Anguissola subverts the traditional artistic representation of women.
metaphor. Faith “unites the soul with Christ as a bride is united with her bridegroom,” Martin Luther wrote, emphasizing how Jesus took on the “sins, death, and damnation” of humanity while bestowing “grace, life, and salvation” on his figurative spouse. Around the same time, statesman and philosopher Thomas More offered a scathing critique of Renaissance English society and morality through his description of the families inhabiting the fictional island of Utopia. The lives and works of several women
enable us to explore the gendered tensions and dialogues that permeated early modern European society and culture. Marguerite de Navarre, the sister of the early 16th-century French King Francis I, was widely admired for her intelligence and diplomatic prowess. Married for political reasons to men who shared few of her inclinations, and viewed with suspicion by many in the Church, Marguerite was nevertheless crucial to the promotion of humanist culture and religious reform movements in France. Her most famous work, The
