Week 3 - IYI: Women in the Renaissance

"IYI" stands for If You're Interested.* I'll post these when I can, as questions about specific topics come up in class. Feel free to suggest topics or themes for future IYIs. As the acronym implies, all of this is optional reading.

Several of you expressed interest in women's history in the Renaissance. If you'd like to read primary texts by and about women's lives and roles in society, you might want to look at Distaves and Dames, edited by Diane Bornstein, and Renaissance Feminism,, edited by Constance Jordan. Our textbook includes a number of female writers, but its choices are idiosyncratic and sometimes tokenistic. Interesting writers we will not be reading as a class include (but are not limited to) Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke; Isabella Whitney; Aemilia Lanyer; Elizabeth Cary; and Margaret Cavendish.

It's hard to recommend a single secondary text, since everyone has an angle and underlying politics. If you're interested in social history, you might look at Anne Laurence's Women in England, 1500-1760 or Mary Beth Rose's Women in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Good but problematic literary studies include Dympna Callaghan's Shakespeare Without Women and two collections of essays: Feminist Readings of Early Modern Culture, edited by Traub/Kaplan/Callaghan, and Enclosure Acts, edited by Burt and Archer.

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*Hat-tip to David Foster Wallace.