Did women have a Renaissance?

It depends on whose evidence you weigh, and a historian named Joan Kelly asked exactly that. Her 1977 essay "Did Women Have a Renaissance?" challenged the usual history of the period by arguing that women's power and agency declined. She said women's historical experience differed from men's: men's options may have expanded in the Renaissance, but the opposite was true for women. Drawing on contemporary literature, she argued that courtly love led to an increased emphasis on women's passivity and virginity, and that the Renaissance led to a greater gender dichotomy, lessening the agency women had had in the Middle Ages.

Individual lives add to the picture. Isabella d'Este, Marchioness of Mantua, served as regent during her husband's absence and her son's minority, and when her husband was captured in 1509 she took control of Mantua's military forces and held off the invaders until 1512. She could recite Virgil, Cicero and Terence by heart. Cassandra Fedele, aged twenty-two in 1487, delivered a Latin speech at Padua that was published in three cities, and Laura Cereta was one of the most notable humanist and feminist writers of fifteenth-century Italy.

The querelle des femmes was a debate about the nature of women, their capabilities and whether they should be permitted to study, write or govern as men did. Many argued that women's nature prevented higher learning, since classical Aristotelianism held that women are incapable of reason. Christine de Pizan wrote what are considered some of the earliest feminist writings.

Historians have answered her in different ways. Many of her specific arguments, especially about the sexual freedom of medieval women, have since been discredited, and Prudence Allen reached a highly optimistic view of the period. Social and economic historians have found either a downturn, as Kelly argued, or an underlying continuity. But her question stuck: it encouraged historians to reassess periodization through the lens of women's experiences.