Women's Role In The Renaissance

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Tudor studies fail to utilize a huge research possibility. Queenship studies concern themselves with women’s relevance in defining their husbands, fathers, and brothers. This leaves feminine political pursuits and constructs out of the conversation. Despite its prevalence, female agency and image construction prior to the reigns of Mary I and Elizabeth I remains virtually unexamined. While lower class women face scant sources, noblewomen offer an origin of the political and academic women in many sources. By rereading how women took power in the late medieval and early renaissance periods, scholars can push popular concepts of women away from the sinner and saint spectrum. Patriarchal dominance over centuries painted these women negatively …show more content…
Oversight that stems from academia’s patriarchal history and internal fighting since the introduction of women’s history in the 1960s and 1970s. Currently, historians either agree with Joan Kelly’s 1977 Did Women Have a Renaissance? or reject it. A more recent champion of the argument for women lacking a Renaissance experience comes in form of Margaret King in her 1991 monograph, Women of the Renaissance. The classical perspective of women in the Renaissance from Burckhardt and his allies paints a rather egalitarian and problematic image of women in the period, only metered by the likes of Kelly and King. To discuss women, one must acknowledge all Renaissance women filled the role of mothers, daughters, wives, widows, and workers defined chiefly by male sexual and benefit. Other more even more dismal views, like that of Christine Klapisch-Zuber consider many women and children merely as “passing guests” …show more content…
Though these writers argue the period constitutes a time “when women were merely women…. they were despised. Disordered, unstable, cold and wet, ‘hysterical’, they were all womb, the Greek hysteros” in Rabelaisian scrutiny, it simply is not true. While motifs of Amazons , masculine virgins , matrons, and crones definitely do describe the artistic representation preserved most, this insistence fails to consider the complexity of humans. Just as now, ideas of femininity, wifehood, mistresses, and queens in Tudor England faced radical new learning and change. To claim otherwise diminishes the work these women put forth in creating a different
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