Download or read book Invention of the Renaissance Woman written by Pamela Joseph Benson and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2010-11-01 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the Renaissance the nature of womankind was a major topic of debate. Numerous dialogues, defenses, paradoxes, and tributes devoted to sustaining woman's excellence were published, and in them history was rewritten to include the achievements of womankind. Often these texts demonstrate that women are capable of acting with prudence, temperance, fortitude, and justice, and thus are capable of being independent of male political and moral authority. Pamela Benson argues that the writers use literary means (genre, characterization, narrator, paradox, plot) to defeat the political challenge posed by female independence and to restrain women within a traditional role. The Invention of the Renaissance Woman is a study of the literary strategies used both to create the notion of the independent woman and to restrain her. Traditionally, the profeminism of most of these texts has not been taken seriously because their playful or extreme styles have been read as a sign that they were nothing but a game. Benson demonstrates that the flamboyant and frequently paradoxical style of these texts is the key to their successful profeminism. She defines the literary and conceptual differences between the Italian and English traditions and argues that two of the greatest literary works of the Renaissance, the Orlando furioso and The Faerie Queene, are major texts in the tradition of defense and praise of women. The Inventions of the Renaissance Women is the first substantial contextual discussion of the majority of the Italian texts and many of the English ones. Benson uses the insights of feminist theory and of cultural studies without subordinating the Renaissance texts to a modern political agenda. Among the authors discussed are Spenser, Boccaccio, Ariosto, Castiglione, Vespasiano da Bisticci, Thomas More, Thomas Elyot, Juan Luis Vives, Richard Hyrde, Jane Anger, and Henry Howard.
Download or read book Women of the Renaissance written by Margaret L. King and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2008-04-10 with total page 351 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this informative and lively volume, Margaret L. King synthesizes a large body of literature on the condition of western European women in the Renaissance centuries (1350-1650), crafting a much-needed and unified overview of women's experience in Renaissance society. Utilizing the perspectives of social, church, and intellectual history, King looks at women of all classes, in both usual and unusual settings. She first describes the familial roles filled by most women of the day—as mothers, daughters, wives, widows, and workers. She turns then to that significant fraction of women in, and acted upon, by the church: nuns, uncloistered holy women, saints, heretics, reformers,and witches, devoting special attention to the social and economic independence monastic life afforded them. The lives of exceptional women, those warriors, queens, patronesses, scholars, and visionaries who found some other place in society for their energies and strivings, are explored, with consideration given to the works and writings of those first protesting female subordination: the French Christine de Pizan, the Italian Modesta da Pozzo, the English Mary Astell. Of interest to students of European history and women's studies, King's volume will also appeal to general readers seeking an informative, engaging entrance into the Renaissance period.
Download or read book How to Be a Renaissance Woman written by Jill Burke and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2024-01-02 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An alternative history of the Renaissance—as seen through the emerging literature of beauty tips—focusing on the actresses, authors, and courtesans who rebelled against the misogyny of their era. Beauty, make-up, art, power: How to Be a Renaissance Woman presents an alternative history of this fascinating period as told by the women behind the paintings, providing a window into their often overlooked or silenced lives. Can the pressures women feel to look good be traced back to the sixteenth century? As the Renaissance visual world became populated by female nudes from the likes of Michelangelo and Titian, a vibrant literary scene of beauty tips emerged, fueling debates about cosmetics and adornment. Telling the stories of courtesans, artists, actresses, and writers rebelling against the strictures of their time, when burgeoning colonialism gave rise to increasingly sinister evaluations of bodies and skin color, this book puts beauty culture into the frame. How to Be a Renaissance Woman will take readers from bustling Italian market squares, the places where the poorest women and immigrant communities influenced cosmetic products and practices, to the highest echelons of Renaissance society, where beauty could be a powerful weapon in securing strategic marriages and family alliances. It will investigate how skin-whitening practices shifted in step with the emerging sub-Saharan African slave trade, how fads for fattening and thinning diets came and went, and how hairstyles and fashion could be a tool for dissent and rebellion—then as now. This surprising and illuminating narrative will make you question your ideas about your own body, and ask: Why are women often so critical of their appearance? What do we stand to lose, but also to gain, from beauty culture? What is the relationship between looks and power?
Download or read book Renaissance Woman written by Gaia Servadio and published by I.B. Tauris. This book was released on 2016-01-30 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Renaissance created a new vision of womanhood and indeed a “New Woman,” proposes Gaia Servadio in this rich feast of a book. She dates the birth of this revolutionary movement to the invention of the printing press in 1456, which made books–and hence education–available to women. Central to her story are the lives of such as Vittoria Colonna, whose extraordinary mutual love with Michelangelo is told here; Tullia d'Aragona, poet and the best known courtesan of her age; and French poet Louise Labé, who fought in battle in male clothes. They are placed center stage to the Renaissance's power plays, paintings and architecture, courtesans and popes, music and manners, fashion, food, cosmetics, changing societies and the language of poetry and symbols.
Download or read book Da Vinci s Tiger written by L. M. Elliott and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2015-11-10 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For fans of rich and vivid historical novels like Girl with a Pearl Earring and Code Name Verity, Laura Malone Elliott delivers the stunning tale of real-life Renaissance woman Ginevra de' Benci, the inspiration for one of Leonardo da Vinci's earliest masterpieces. The young and beautiful daughter of a wealthy family, Ginevra longs to share her poetry and participate in the artistic ferment of Renaissance Florence but is trapped in an arranged marriage in a society dictated by men. The arrival of the charismatic Venetian ambassador, Bernardo Bembo, introduces Ginevra to a dazzling circle of patrons, artists, and philosophers. Bembo chooses Ginevra as his Platonic muse and commissions a portrait of her by a young Leonardo da Vinci. Posing for the brilliant painter inspires an intimate connection between them, one Ginevra only begins to understand. In a rich and vivid world of exquisite art with a dangerous underbelly of deadly political feuds, Ginevra faces many challenges to discover her voice and artistic companionship—and to find love.
Download or read book Renaissance Woman written by Gaia Servadio and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The Renaissance created a new vision of womanhood and indeed a "New Woman," proposes Gaia Servadio in this rich feast of a book. She dates the birth of this revolutionary movement to the invention of the printing press in 1456, which made books-and hence education-available to women. Central to her story are the lives of such as Vittoria Colonna, whose extraordinary mutual love with Michelangelo is told here; Tullia d'Aragona, poet and the best known courtesan of her age; and French poet Louise Labe, who fought in battle in male clothes. They are placed center stage to the Renaissance's power plays, paintings and architecture, courtesans and popes, music and manners, fashion, food, cosmetics, changing societies and the language of poetry and symbols."--Bloomsbury Publishing.
Download or read book Renaissance Woman written by Ramie Targoff and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2018-04-17 with total page 390 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A biography of Vittoria Colonna, confidante of Michelangelo, scion of one of the most powerful families of her era, and a pivotal figure in the Italian Renaissance Ramie Targoff’s Renaissance Woman tells of the most remarkable woman of the Italian Renaissance: Vittoria Colonna, Marchesa of Pescara. Vittoria has long been celebrated by scholars of Michelangelo as the artist’s best friend—the two of them exchanged beautiful letters, poems, and works of art that bear witness to their intimacy—but she also had close ties to Charles V, Pope Clement VII and Pope Paul III, Pietro Bembo, Baldassare Castiglione, Pietro Aretino, Queen Marguerite de Navarre, Reginald Pole, and Isabella d’Este, among others. Vittoria was the scion of an immensely powerful family in Rome during that city’s most explosively creative era. Art and literature flourished, but political and religious life were under terrific strain. Personally involved with nearly every major development of this period—through both her marriage and her own talents—Vittoria was not only a critical political actor and negotiator but also the first woman to publish a book of poems in Italy, an event that launched a revolution for Italian women’s writing. Vittoria was, in short, at the very heart of what we celebrate when we think about sixteenth-century Italy; through her story the Renaissance comes to life anew.
Download or read book Renaissance Woman written by Linda S. Bowlby and published by Red Earth Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a society where men are often complimented as Renaissance men, why is there no equivalent phrase, Renaissance woman? The author searches for answers to this question by examining the art and social structures of Ancient Greece, the Middle Ages, and Italian Renaissance. Her quest lays bare the roots of our patriarchal and often misogynistic society, but also explores positive historical models to guide women in the third millennium.
Download or read book A History of Women in the West written by Georges Duby and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1992 with total page 596 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Discusses the legal, social, and religious position of women in the Greco-Roman world, Middle Ages, Renaissance, Industrial Revolution, and modern era.
Download or read book Madame de Pompadour written by Evelyne Lever and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2003-09 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this biography, historian Evelyne Lever chronicles the extraordinary life of the most famous and influential mistress of Louis XV: Jeanne-Antoinette de Pompadour - a bourgeois girl of questionable parentage who would rise to the highest ranks of French society and maintain a twenty-year relationship with Louis XV.
Download or read book Women Family and Ritual in Renaissance Italy written by Christiane Klapisch-Zuber and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1987-06-15 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: English translations of the author's most important articles.
Download or read book Savonarola s Women written by Tamar Herzig and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Girolamo Savonarola (1452–1498), the religious reformer, preacher, and Florentine civic leader, was burned at the stake as a false prophet by the order of Pope Alexander VI. Tamar Herzig here explores the networks of Savonarola’s female followers that proliferated in the two generations following his death. Drawing on sources from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, many never before studied, transcribed, or contextualized in Savonarolan scholarship and religious history, Herzig shows how powerful public figures and clerics continued to ally themselves with these holy women long after the prophet’s death. In their quest to stay true to their leader’s teachings, Savonarola’s female followers faced hostile superiors within their orders, local political pressures, and the deep-rooted misogynistic assumptions of the Church establishment. This unprecedented volume demonstrates how reform circles throughout the Italian peninsula each tailored Savonarola’s life and works to their particular communities’ regionally specific needs. Savonarola’s Women is an important reconstruction of women’s influence on one of the most important and controversial religious movements in premodern Europe.
Download or read book Renaissance Woman written by Kate Aughterson and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 1995 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book contains a collection of critically informed accounts of women and femininity in early modern England. The work is divided thematically into nine sections, each with an accessible introduction and notes.
Download or read book Power and Gender in Renaissance Spain written by Helen Nader and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of essays which provide portraits of eight of the Mendoza family's female members. It explores the lives of powerful women whose lineage gave them status within a patriarchal society designed to keep women from public life.
Download or read book The Education of Italian Renaissance Women written by Melinda K. Blade and published by . This book was released on 1981 with total page 70 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book A Cultural History of Women in the Renaissance written by Karen Raber and published by Bloomsbury Academic. This book was released on 2016-09-22 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Renaissance was a period of significant cultural transformation in Europe: women were both agents and objects of this historical process. The period witnessed revolutions in nearly every cultural domain, including the controversies of the Reformation, the rise of nascent capitalism, the influence of Humanism, advances in science and medicine, and shifts in the boundaries between public and private life, all of which profoundly affected women's lives. A Cultural History of Women in the Renaissance covers the period 1400-1650, giving an overview of how changes in social, educational, economic, scientific, religious and artistic paradigms affected cultural constructions of gender and the lived experiences of women in the period. Each chapter draws on a wide range of sources to chart the complex and often contradictory cultural logics of gender in Renaissance culture.
Download or read book The Renaissance Woman written by Hannelore Sachs and published by . This book was released on 1971 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
