King, Margaret. Women of the Renaissance. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991. A large schism exists in Renaissance studies of women in which historians normally find themselves agreeing with Joan Kelly’s 1977 Did Women Have a Renaissance?, or rejecting it; Margaret King, another prolific author in the field, finds herself hand in hand with Kelly in her 1991 Le Donne nel Rinascimento, or Women of the Renaissance. King continues the discussion on women’s lack of experiencing a Renaissance in the early modern period, thus perpetuating a darker more patriarchal and dismal atmosphere for women. Through an examination of Women in the Family, Women in the Church, and Women in High Culture, King’s monograph summarizes the field’s state in
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She writes the most heavily on the situations between wet nurses, mothers, and the fates of babies. In this vein, she considers many women and children merely as “passing guests”, similarly to Christine Klapisch-Zuber, in a masculine world with most of her argument in this first section directly reiterating Kelly for readers unaware of her argument. By her interpretation, women solely found definition by sexual and economic relationships, which dictates the prevailing imagery of virgin-matron-crone in medieval and Renaissance texts and art. The sole challenge to this perspective in the chapter comes in the subheading of Widows, which asserts that in the case of a male dying first, widows held opportunities to gain significant wealth for themselves and continued in the next subheading of Workers, in which women often held agency in domestic management, but only barely …show more content…
King’s view of agency or ability of women remains dark, and this chapter largely asserts the use of nunneries and monasteries as proverbial dumping grounds from which families could only benefit. She discusses the practice of oblation as preferential to the previously discussed infanticide or not having a dowry due to the largest portion of nuns coming from the patrician class. (83) Critics of King’s writing, however, can find ample material in this chapter as the discussion often veers from the task at hand, and she claims only self-chosen nuns enjoyed their time in convents, or determined nuns seeking to still define themselves through an aspect of sexuality, virginity, with minimal attention to women who may have genuinely been religious. (89; 93-103) She does continue to discuss holy women outside of the church, but her treatment of convents is questionable. Fitting into her field, she too, argues the change from opportunities for women shifting from access to divinity to solely mothers in the Protestant Reformation, later refined by Kirsi Stjerna in her 2009 Women in the
She writes the most heavily on the situations between wet nurses, mothers, and the fates of babies. In this vein, she considers many women and children merely as “passing guests”, similarly to Christine Klapisch-Zuber, in a masculine world with most of her argument in this first section directly reiterating Kelly for readers unaware of her argument. By her interpretation, women solely found definition by sexual and economic relationships, which dictates the prevailing imagery of virgin-matron-crone in medieval and Renaissance texts and art. The sole challenge to this perspective in the chapter comes in the subheading of Widows, which asserts that in the case of a male dying first, widows held opportunities to gain significant wealth for themselves and continued in the next subheading of Workers, in which women often held agency in domestic management, but only barely …show more content…
King’s view of agency or ability of women remains dark, and this chapter largely asserts the use of nunneries and monasteries as proverbial dumping grounds from which families could only benefit. She discusses the practice of oblation as preferential to the previously discussed infanticide or not having a dowry due to the largest portion of nuns coming from the patrician class. (83) Critics of King’s writing, however, can find ample material in this chapter as the discussion often veers from the task at hand, and she claims only self-chosen nuns enjoyed their time in convents, or determined nuns seeking to still define themselves through an aspect of sexuality, virginity, with minimal attention to women who may have genuinely been religious. (89; 93-103) She does continue to discuss holy women outside of the church, but her treatment of convents is questionable. Fitting into her field, she too, argues the change from opportunities for women shifting from access to divinity to solely mothers in the Protestant Reformation, later refined by Kirsi Stjerna in her 2009 Women in the