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Writing Women and Reading the Renaissance*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Barbara Kiefer Lewalski
Barbara Kiefer Lewalski*
Affiliation:
Harvard University
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Extract

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.

Type
From the 1991 National Conference
Information
Renaissance Quarterly , Volume 44 , Issue 4 , Winter 1991 , pp. 792 - 821
Copyright
Copyright © Renaissance Society of America 1991

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Footnotes

*

This essay is a version of the Josephine Waters Bennett Lecture delivered at the National Conference of the Renaissance Society of America in Durham, NC, in spring, 1991.

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