"Did Women Have a Renaissance?"
Did Women Have a Renaissance? Unfortunately, the absence of women's stories in many areas of Renaissance studies has led to little discussion of the social and political regulation that caused it, and of how transgressions of female boundaries might have been achieved. However, a growing number of feminist scholars have shown that women in the Renaissance did not merely internalize the roles urged on them, but rather constructed positions for themselves in everyday life, as well as in the more elite pursuits of literature, music, and art. Art in particular was a powerful method of controlling women, through a myriad of visual examples and social pressures, and it offers especially rich material for the study of Italian Renaissance female roles and women's transgressions of them.
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