| Line | Jacob Burckhardts view that Renaissance |
| European women stood on a footing of perfect | |
| equality with Renaissance men has been repeatedly | |
| cited by feminist scholars as a prelude to their | |
| (5) | presentation of rich historical evidence of womens |
| inequality. In striking contrast to Burckhardt, Joan | |
| Kelly in her famous 1977 essay, Did Women Have | |
| a Renaissance? argued that the Renaissance was | |
| a period of economic and social decline for women | |
| (10) | relative both to Renaissance men and to medieval |
| women. Recently, however, a significant trend | |
| among feminist scholars has entailed a rejection | |
| of both Kellys dark vision of the Renaissance and | |
| Burckhardts rosy one. Many recent works by these | |
| (15) | scholars stress the ways in which differences |
| among Renaissance women—especially in terms | |
| of social status and religion—work to complicate | |
| the kinds of generalizations both Burckhardt and | |
| Kelly made on the basis of their observations about | |
| (20) | upper-class Italian women. |
| The trend is also evident, however, in works | |
| focusing on those middle- and upper-class | |
| European women whose ability to write gives them | |
| disproportionate representation in the historical | |
| (25) | record. Such women were, simply by virtue of |
| their literacy, members of a tiny minority of the | |
| population, so it is risky to take their descriptions of | |
| their experiences as typical of female experience | |
| in any general sense. Tina Krontiris, for example, in | |
| (30) | her fascinating study of six Renaissance women |
| writers, does tend at times to conflate women and | |
| women writers, assuming that womens gender, | |
| irrespective of other social differences, including | |
| literacy, allows us to view women as a homogeneous | |
| (35) | social group and make that group an object of |
| analysis. Nonetheless, Krontiris makes a significant | |
| contribution to the field and is representative of | |
| those authors who offer what might be called a | |
| cautiously optimistic assessment of Renaissance | |
| (40) | womens achievements, although she also stresses |
| the social obstacles Renaissance women faced | |
| when they sought to raise their oppositional | |
| voices. Krontiris is concerned to show women | |
| intentionally negotiating some power for themselves | |
| (45) | (at least in the realm of public discourse) against |
| potentially constraining ideologies, but in her sober | |
| and thoughtful concluding remarks, she suggests | |
| that such verbal opposition to cultural stereotypes | |
| was highly circumscribed; women seldom attacked | |
| (50) | the basic assumptions in the ideologies that |
| oppressed them. |
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