Advanced Seminar: Women in Renaissance Italy

3 units

In Renaissance Italy, long-standing yet self-contradictory stereotypes of women contended with one another, as well as with new notions of domesticity, emergent models of education for women, and harsh social realities of legal subordination and political exclusion. This course explores ideas about women and the lived experience of women in the varied environments of Renaissance Italy, from the merchant republics of Florence and Venice to the princely courts of the Po valley, and from middle-class households to aristocratic convents. Readings will include primary sources (sermons, short stories, letters, diaries, chronicles, treatises, and court records, as well as surviving examples of material culture including paintings and sculpture) in English translation, as well as modern studies of women in Renaissance culture, society, and politics. Pre-modern, Europe.