The Birth of Feminism: Woman as Intellect in Renaissance Italy and England [Hardcover]

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 focuses on nineteen learned women from the middle ranks of society who rose to prominence in the world of Italian and English letters between 1400 and 1680. Drawing both on archival materialwills, letters, and manuscript compositions, some presented here for the first timeand on printed writings, Ross gives us an unprecedented sense of educated early modern womens lives.

Sponsored and often educated by their learned fathers and other male relatives within a model that Ross terms the intellectual family, female authors publicized their works within the safety of family networks. These women, including Christine de Pizan, Laura Cereta, Margaret More Roper, Lucrezia Marinella, and Bathsua Makin, did not argue for womens political equality, but they represented and often advocated womens intellectual equality. Ross demonstrates that because of their education, these women had a renaissance during the Renaissance, and that in so doing they laid the foundation for the emancipation of womankind.

A provocative and academic new reading of Renaissance feminism for a post-feminist generation.The Birth of Feminism comes to us as a crucial book at this time since--strange to say--we still lack synthetic, comprehensive studies in women's literary and political history prior to 1750. Ross's book spans 300 years and documents the rise of a discourse of women's rights and the culture of feminism in two nations, offering a much needed guide to the period and its chief actors.This is an impressive and very persuasive study. I would recommend it to anyone interested in women's literature, women's history, or in the history lF