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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 November 2018
The initial impression given by the foregoing papers is of sharp differences between the approaches of historians, art historians, and Shakespeare scholars to family, marriage, and sex. It is quite en historien, for example, that Barbara Diefendorf chooses to dwell on the collective, outward-looking institutions of family and marriage, rather than the intimate, individual, hard-to-plot matter of sexuality. Historians traditionally have been more accustomed to concerning themselves with groups, above all with traceable patterns in what groups do, than with the private quirks of individual actors in the past. This makes an intriguing contrast with Rona Goffen's emphasis on individual sensibility: of the artist, of the patron, and of the modern interpreter of visual evidence.
1 It is important to acknowledge the influence of Clifford Geertz, as formulator and as tracer of conceptual overlap across interdisciplinary lines; see especially “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture,” and “Blurred Genres.” Examples of the impact of Geertz's ideas of culture can be found, for English literature, in the introduction to Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning, and, for history, in the introduction to Muir, Civic Ritual in Renaissance Venice. See also James Clifford, “On Ethnographic Seif-Fashioning,” in Heller, et al., eds., Reconstructing Individualism.
2 Kahn, “The Hidden Mother.”
3 For influential formulations, see Stone, The Family, Sex, and Marriage and Davis, “Women on Top”; see also the editors’ introductions to Ferguson, et al., eds., Rewriting the Renaissance and Rose, ed., Women in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.
4 Goldthwaite, The Building of Renaissance Florence; Kent, “ ‘Più superba de quella de Lorenzo.’ ”
5 Scott, “Gender,” argues for the application of the category of gender to broader areas of historical investigation.
6 Already over a decade ago, Natalie Davis noted the possibilities in a nuanced notion of gender exploring both femininity and masculinity: “ ‘Women's History’ in Transition.”
7 Stone, Family, Sex, and Marriage, p. 109.
8 On psychological aspects of the convent vocation in different settings, see Brown, Immodest Acts; Trexler, “Le Célibat à la fin du Moyen Age”; Ruggiero, Boundaries of Eros, ch. 4; Ozment, When Fathers Ruled, ch. 1.
9 Diefendorf, “Widowhood and Remarriage”; Goffen, Piety and Patronage, esp. pp. 32-38. See also Martines, “A Way of Looking at Women,” and Chojnacki, “Wives and Husbands.”
10 Fitz, “ ‘What Says the Married Woman’ “; Klapisch-Zuber, “The ‘Cruel Mother.’ ” On the female as an imperfect approximation of the male, see Greenblatt, “Fiction or Friction,” and Stallybrass, “Patriarchal Territories.”
11 For a searching, historically pitched discussion of gender-based partitions of the two spheres, see Elshtain, Public Man, Private Woman.
12 Scott, “Gender.” See Wiesner, “Women's Defense of Their Public Role,” but also Davis, “Women in the Crafts” and Howell, “Women, the Family Economy, and the Structures.”
13 Stone, Family, Sex, and Marriage, and Kelly-Gadol, “Did Women Have a Renaissance.” For an example of their influence, see the “Introduction” to Ferguson et al., Rewriting the Renaissance, p. xviii and passim.
14 See, for example, the contrasting but equally nuanced assessments of English peasant women and marital relationships in Hanawalt, The Ties That Bound, and Bennett, Women in the Medieval English Countryside. More generally, see Herlihy, Medieval Households.
15 But see Brown, “A Woman's Place Was in the Home,” and Wiesner, “Women's Defense of Their Public Role.” On the complex issue of Elizabethans’ responses to their female monarch, see Montrose, “A Midsummer Night's Dream” and Marcus, “Shakespeare's Comic Heroines.”
16 Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning frames well the tension between individual and increasingly crowded environment in the Renaissance. Davis, “Boundaries and the Sense of Self,” considers the effort to realize identity within the family.
17 See Brown, Immodest Acts, for the nun assuming a male voice at the time of her lesbian sexual activity; Greenblatt, “Fiction or Friction,” for a woman's ostensibly female bedfellow admitting—or claiming—to be male.
18 Ruggiero, Boundaries of Eros, suggests, in contrast to Michel Foucault, that the Renaissance, and specifically fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Venice, was the birthplace and birthtime of modern sexuality. For Foucault's fixing of it in the early eighteenth century, see his A History of Sexuality, I: An Introduction.
