Women of the Renaissance Margaret

¶ … Women of the Renaissance

Margaret L. King's book, Women of the Renaissance, published in 1991, by the University of Chicago Press proves to be an informative source for looking into the lives of women and the roles they played during this era. King covers the various roles of women from 1350 to 1650 in western Europe with "glances elsewhere" (King xiii). King is careful to examine the differences between the classes of women, noting that the "fourteenth-century nun and the seventeenth-century savante have more in common than a merchant's wife and a children's nurse" (xiii). The material covered is rich in detail covering women's roles in he family, the church, and in the elite class. By structuring the book this way, King covers society as a whole, including all women - from preacher's wives to prostitutes. King writes in a style that is engaging and interesting, which makes the drier portions of the book more palatable.

The first section, "Daughters and Mothers," is a fair introduction to the culture and place of women during the Renaissance. Mother and child, as would be expected, comes first as King shines the light on religion, family, mothers, and children. The family was significant and it was not unusual for wealthy women to bear five of six children. Women not only suffered through childbirth but also in daily life as well. It was not unusual for women to lose their lives in childbirth. King ends the first section by asserting, "Daughter, mother, widow, virgin, matron, crone: these were the possibilities that encircled the female sex. A very few, by an act of will or fortune, escaped the endless dance whose mode was set by sex and whose measure was set by years" (24). Wives had the pleasure of developing a "relationship with her husband negotiated between contradictory injunctions" (35).

Marriage, for women, during the Renaissance was "fundamentally negative" (47)and women were generally looked down upon and "attacks on women were backed by the apparatus of learned culture: philosophical, legal, theological, medical, resting on the authority of Scripture and the Fathers, Aristotle, Galen, and Thomas Aquinas" (47). In marriage, women had no control. The husband was "empowered to dispose of all property: his own, his wife's, their joint property" (50). This unfortunate circumstance was the result of the "theme of companionship" (35) that was defined by male theorists of that time.

The second section, "Daughters of Mary," focuses on women and the church. This is an enlightening section because it does not just cover women in the church but also women in the church. An interesting piece in this section covers the fourteenth-century inquisition and how that effected women. Witches were women that had "entered into a pact with the devil" (149) and met with him regularly.

King asserts that this European witch-hunt was unique in its "proportions and consequences" (159). The torture for such a crime was "one of the innovations if the modern judicial system" (150), which included beatings until confession. After confession, the punishment was death, usually by burning. The witch-hunts did not cease until the age of reason. Other portions of this section cover women in the church and how they managed to flourish despite the "boundaries of autonomy" (103). Women were courageous enough to create "new opportunities" (103) that allowed them to enjoy some of the same freedoms men enjoyed. King claims that the most "charismatic" movement was that of the Beguines. While initially labeled heretics, the Beguines they lived from the work of their own hands and "posed a different model of voluntary poverty" (104). In this section, King also covers almost every religion and sect that she could and the women that they affected. From Protestantism to witches, King peers into the lives of women everywhere. We see that religion played a hefty role in women's lives - regardless of what belief they followed.

The last section of the book, "Virgo et Virago," looks at the women of the elite class. While this is by no means the largest section of the book, it is the most hopeful and the most pleasurable to read. This final chapter focuses on how women have moved away from the patriarchal society. King lists Christine de Pizan and Gaspara Stampa. In comparison, the previous sections are not as informative or enlightening because the do not have the same attention to detail.

Poor women were not lucky enough to receive an education. However, middle and upper-class women were "initiated in a particular female culture, however, in which they were taught to perform household functions" (164). Women from the elite classes received more of a traditional education, which could include learning French, music lessons, math, and "might go on to organize a fashionable salon for the discussion of new ideas" (168). On the life of Christine de Pizan, King writes, the "first woman of the Western tradition to make a living by her pen" (219). De Pizan was well-educated at the age of 25, de Pizan was a widow at the age of 25 and "established for herself in an unprecedented career for women" (219). She was able to support herself by writing. In doing so, she became a "master and not a victim of circumstance" (220). King goes into great detail regarding de Pizan's book, the City of Ladies, which is momumental in its style and structure - especially the significance of women. De Pizan wrote, among many things, that God, who created all things good, created woman as well and he did so not from dirt but from Adam's rib so she could be his equal. King maintains that no other writer for some three hundred years would not have the influence that de Pizan did. This section is by far the most interesting and inspiring of the entire book. It is with great pleasure that we finally read about the rise of women and their attempt to take from the world all that it can give them. It is a shame that this success was limited to the elite but all things but begin somewhere. From daring to teach to daring to be taught, women finally see a shift in attitude by the end of the Renaissance.