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By the end of the fifteenth century, Cassandra Fedele (1465-1558), a learned middle-class woman of Venice, was arguably the most famous woman writer and scholar in Europe. A cultural icon in her own time, she regularly corresponded with the king of France, lords of Milan and Naples, the Borgia pope Alexander VI, and even maintained a ten-year epistolary exchange with Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand of Spain that resulted in an invitation for her to join their court. Fedele's letters reveal the central, mediating role she occupied in a community of scholars otherwise inaccessible to women. Her unique admittance into this community is also highlighted by her presence as the first independent woman writer in Italy to speak publicly and, more importantly, the first to address philosophical, political, and moral issues in her own voice. Her three public orations and almost all of her letters, translated into English, are presented here for the first time.
Renaissance writer Laura Cereta (1469–1499) presents feminist issues in a predominantly male venue—the humanist autobiography in the form of personal letters. Cereta's works circulated widely in Italy during the early modern era, but her complete letters have never before been published in English. In her public lectures and essays, Cereta explores the history of women's contributions to the intellectual and political life of Europe. She argues against the slavery of women in marriage and for the rights of women to higher education, the same issues that have occupied feminist thinkers of later centuries. Yet these letters also furnish a detailed portrait of an early modern woman’s private experience, for Cereta addressed many letters to a close circle of family and friends, discussing highly personal concerns such as her difficult relationships with her mother and her husband. Taken together, these letters are a testament both to an individual woman and to enduring feminist concerns.
The culmination of a lifetime's scholarly work, this study by Sister Prudence Allen traces the concept of woman in relation to man in Western thought from ancient times to the present. This volume is the second in her study, in which she explores claims about sex and gender identity in the works of over fifty philosophers (both men and women) in the late medieval and early Renaissance periods.
Publisher description
Examines interrelated topics in Medieval and Renaissance Latin literature: the status of women as writers, the status of women as rhetorical figures, and the status of women in society from the fifth to the early seventeenth century.
This book is part of a 3-volume anthology of women's writing in Latin from antiquity to the early modern era. Each volume provides texts, contexts, and translations of a wide variety of works produced by women, including dramatic, poetic, and devotional writing. Volume Three covers women's writing in Latin during the early modern period (1400-1700).
Publisher description
A fascinating survey of biographical genres
In this illuminating work, surveying 300 years and two nations, Sarah Gwyneth Ross demonstrates how the expanding ranks of learned women in the Renaissance era presented the first significant challenge to the traditional definition of "woman" in the West. An experiment in collective biography and intellectual history, The Birth of Feminism demonstrates that because of their education, these women laid the foundation for the emancipation of womankind.