The Women of the Renaissance

In April when I was holed up in the hospital for a week with nothing to do except feed my newborn baby and sit around and think (because sleep was completely out of the question as most of you new mothers would know) I was, of course, thinking about Orpheus. Now those of you who know me know how time inappropriate I can be. Those of you who don't know me may be thinking how inappropriate it was of me to be thinking about my novel after just having had a baby. Sorry but I'm trying to be honest here.

I was still, painfully, stuck on the idea of time travel. And I was also keen to have a crime thriller as my genre. So I wanted a time travelling woman who would go back to Renaissance Florence to solve a mystery using modern day techniques. However, after a discussion with my good friend and godfather to my son, Nigel, in which he suggested that instead of having a time travelling woman, why not just have a woman with a vast network of women connections to solve the crime, I was thrilled to have the new premise of my book.

Those of you who read my latest excerpt of Finding Orpheus will know that my new leading lady is called Ana. She is an English woman who has lost her memory and has spent the last three years living in a convent learning the ways of the herbal healer. She is not a nun, but rather a paying border who can move through society to help both the rich and poor. I made her a foreigner, something which afforded her a little bit of liberty that the Florentine women did not necessarily have.

My research on women in the Renaissance has brought up a lot of surprising and interesting information. Jacob Burckhardt in his tome The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy made the rather sweeping statement in his chapter entitled The Position of Women: "To understand the higher forms of social intercourse at this period we must keep before our minds the fact that women stood on a footing of perfect equality with men."

This statement was taken at face value by historians for many years until the feminist movement in the 1970s when historians began to revise history and examine it also from a woman's perspective. Joan Kelly's Did Women Have a Renaisssance is one essay that raised the notion that indeed women were not on equal footing with their male counterparts.

Kelly illuminated the unique social position of Italy during the Renaissance: emerging from the Middle Ages and excelling in mercantile and manufacturing business it was more advanced in many ways than other European countries (please keep in mind that "Italy" as a country did not exist at this stage but was instead made up of many individual city states, republics and kingdoms - but that's a lesson for another day). She boldly states that these very advancements "affected women adversely, so much so that there was no renaissance for women - at least not during the Renaissance." (Women, history & theory: the essays of Joan Kelly, p 19 available from Google books). Kelly examines women in a number of roles for her essay: female sexuality; economical and political roles; cultural roles (including education); ideology of women, in particular in art, literature and philosophy (ibid, p20).

In his equally fascinating book Women in the Streets: Essays on Sex and Power in Renaissance Italy Samuel K. Cohn Jr also looks at the decline of the appearance of women after the beginning of the 15 century. His study focuses on evidence from court and criminal archives, convent and dowry lists, and wills. It is an examination of women that delves so much deeper than merely the famous elite women of Italy delivered from a purely bourgeoise perspective. Women such as Sofonisba Anguissola, Catherine de Medici, Simonetta Cattani (beloved, but not wife, of Giuliano de Medici), and Lucrezia Donati (beloved, but not wife of Lorenzo de Medici) are women that are well known to the historian as elite, wealthy women who were able to participate somewhat in Renaissance society. The latter two are referred to as the "ideals of love." This was a common role for women belonging to the upper echelons of society and although Donati and Cattani were both married to other men, their public veneration by the Medici men was infamous. In fact, Lorenzo composed an early love sonnet to Lucrezia.

Catherine Lawless in her essay Women on the Margins: the 'beloved' and the 'mistress' in Renaissance Florence expounds further on this notion of "ideals of love". She also asserts that "Renaissance historians now know a great deal about wives, widows, mothers, nuns, tertiaries, anchoresses; even, although to a much lesser degree, about women who were poets and artists...women who did not fit into such clearly sanctioned, or perhaps it is more true to say, clearly defined roles have received little attention." (From Studies on medieval and early modern women: pawns of players, co-authored with Christine Meek, Four Courts, 2003 and available online at Three Monkeys Online

K.J.P Lowe's work Nuns' chronicles and convent culture in Renaissance and Counter-Reformation Italy (Cambridge University Press, 2003) was a look into the lives of a somewhat forgotten and often ignored group of women in Renaissance history. It is insightful and has assisted me in developing a believable and historically accurate portrayal of Le Murate, or the Convent of Santa Annunziata where I have set my novel.

The role of women in Renaissance Italy and in particular Florence is an important one to the student of the Renaissance and it is worth investigating further. To accept Jacob Burckhardt's dated and now incorrect statement is an easy out for the student of history and further, deeper investigation is required (as is often the case in women's history) to truly understand the complex and diverse roles of women during this time. I hope these sources and this brief essay has helped those of you who are wishing to delve deeper and really examine closely the women of the Renaissance.

Kirsty x