Writing Women and Reading the Renaissance

If there is anything that scholars in the Renaissance and scholars of the Renaissance (of whatever ideological persuasion) might be expected to share, it is delight in the recovery of texts worthy of attention as aesthetic objects and/or as significant documents for interpreting the period. Arguably such new texts—and especially texts and artworks by women—will constitute the most enduring element in our ongoing reconstruction of the Renaissance. Thanks to a decade or so of feminist and cultural studies focussed on gender and the social construction of identity, we now know a good deal about how early modern society constructed women within several discourses—law, medicine, theology, courtiership, domestic advice.