Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal 2013, vol. 8

Forum: Revisiting Joan Kelly’s “Did Women Have a ?”

Foreword

he word “Renaissance” seemed full of promise as a term for peri- Todization when, in 1946–1947, I took a course in Renaissance and Reformation from Leona Gabel at Smith College. We weren’t following the history of one kingdom or city-state; we were looking at movements across Western Europe. We weren’t just tracing political rule, struggles for power, and military adventure; we were tracking ideas about history and the state, art and patronage, and the concept of the person, of “man” and his potentialities, high and low. Miss Gabel’s lectures also described merchant princes, and those who, like me, were interested in Marxist approaches could turn to exciting recent books linking “Renaissance” to the rising bourgeoisie. To be sure, after the Ciompi revolt of Florentine wool-carders in the fourteenth century, the only other lower orders described were the artists and goldsmiths purveying to rich patrons. Peasants did not appear until the Reformation unit, when Luther denounced the Peasants’ Revolt. As for women, we students read our assigned ’s Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, where we met some striking upper- class women who sought to cultivate “complete individuality” and even wrote immortal poetry. Burckhardt affirmed that “women stood on a footing of perfect equality with men,” but then modified this to say, “these women had not thought of . . . public [life]; their function was to influence distinguished men, to moderate male impulse and caprice.” Indeed, “Renaissance” brought exhilarating possibilities into our lives just after World War II. It resonated with the idea of “Europe”: so many of

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the scholars writing about it were refugees from the Nazis and bringing us new ideas from their European past. The sense of rebirth coincided with our hopes, before the Cold War had rigidified, to rebuild a new world in our own day. That the term “Renaissance” seemed to consign earlier centu- ries to darkness didn’t bother me when I could take a seminar the following year on Charles Homer Haskins’ Renaissance of the Twelfth Century. The concept was transportable — pace Burckhardt — and (as we soon learned from Marc Bloch’s writings) the feudal could have a creative ethos of its own and still leave space for the novelty of the “Renaissance.” At the start of my graduate studies, so long as I confined my research to the world of letters, I didn’t worry about who was having a Renaissance. I could link the defense of “good letters” by the sixteenth-century French humanist Guillaume Budé to a claim for virtuous status quite different from that of the nobility. I could even widen the frame to include the amaz- ing Christine de Pizan, about whom I wrote a seminar paper in 1951 as “the prototype for the first literary woman.” Among the many arguments she used in defense of women and of her own voice were those adopted from Boccaccio and Petrarch in her native Italy. For those insisting on cate- gories, Christine was as much early Renaissance as she was late medieval. • Joan Kelly was born the same year as I; we are from the same generation, and we probably shared the same post-war optimism. During her graduate studies at Columbia, she was guided by two great figures in Renaissance studies: her thesis director Garrett Mattingly, whose celebrated book Renaissance Diplomacy had just appeared, and Paul Oscar Kristeller, who transformed scholarly understanding of Renaissance philosophy and its textual sources. (Mattingly’s first book had been on Catherine of Aragon, the wife of Henry VIII, but being a queen, she could fit into Burckhardt’s Renaissance paradigm.) In 1969, Joan Kelly published Leon Battista Alberti: Universal Man of the Early Renaissance; beautifully researched and argued, her book quickly became a classic study of that remarkable polymath. Her goal was to pro- vide unity to the life of a man whose writings ran from mathematics, art theory, architectural design, and cryptography to rhetoric and moral and Foreword 243

social philosophy. Did any common vision hold together these disparate interests? Was Alberti an uneasy blend of “medieval” and “Renaissance” traits, his thought ultimately “fragmentary” and “unfinished,” as one his- torian had argued? Or rather, as Joan Kelly would show, was there not “one theoretical outlook,” “one comprehensive view of the world and man” underpinning this diversity? Alberti’s unifying vision was grounded in the mathematical science of perspective, a way of organizing space and making pictures of the world. “Ideas of measure, harmony, and proportion” emerge here and are found throughout his work. Reason is his guide, but always linked to practice and enriched by the reading of ancient texts. The rational man maintains a right and virtuous order within himself and without, expressed in family life and in his duties to the city. The chapter in Della Famiglia, in which Alberti has the businessman Gianozzo instruct his illiterate and obedient wife about her household duties, is mentioned by Kelly only in regard to its lively Italian prose style. She concludes:

Renaissance art still teaches us how it feels to be an Alberti, striving to “exercise” our rational powers in a manifold of works and ordering the appearance of things, and life itself in accor- dance with an ideal of harmony.

At the time that she wrote this, Joan Kelly must have identified herself with the “universal” project of Alberti rather than with the predicament of the Gianozzo’s virtuous wife. In a like vein, when Miss Gabel told us students about Pico della Mirandola’s Oration on the Dignity of Man, I just assumed I was included in “man’s” possibilities, both highs and lows. • My moving away from “Renaissance” as the defining event of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Europe and/or as an adequate term for periodization occurred during my graduate studies, when I decided to do my disserta- tion not on a learned figure like Guillaume Budé or Christine de Pizan, but on artisans — and specifically on the printing workers of Lyon (a male group) and the Protestant Reformation. It was a study of socio-economic 244 EMWJ 2013, vol. 8 Natalie Zemon Davis relations and conflict, on the one hand, and ideas, here religious ideas, and practices and their appeal to different groups, on the other. I had to keep asking about the vantage point, the perspective, of different actors. Did Lyon artisans have a Renaissance? Well, the printing workers had links to humanist texts and humanist authors or editors in some ateliers, and their pride in their craft was linked to the printing press — not a rebirth, but a new invention. But much about their cultural, festive, and organizational life had rich sources quite disparate from the “Renaissance” and “good letters.” Did Lyon artisans have a Reformation? For sure, in certain important trades, with printers — masters and workers both — in the vanguard of the popular movement. But here, too, there were different vantage points as the initial egalitarian promise of the priesthood of all believers gave way to the authoritarian structures of an educated clergy and supervisory elders. In writing all these matters up in my earliest publications, I used either “sixteenth century” or “early modern” as period markers. Even with this background, it was still a revelation in 1970, when Jill Ker Conway told me about the pioneering dissertation she had recently completed at Harvard on the first generation of American women doc- toral students and their careers. As I learned of the implications of her work, of the light it cast both on women’s lives and on American society and culture more generally, I began to see the enormous possibilities in the study of the history of women. Now I understood how I could put to use those notes I’d somehow collected over the years on Lyon women in crafts or Protestant women or printers’ wives or what have you. There was a story there, different from that of their husbands, and I could tell it. As we planned together the course we could give in 1971–1972, “Society and the Sexes in Early Modern France and the ,” Jill Conway and I struggled precisely with those questions that were central to Joan Kelly’s “Did Women Have a Renaissance?” and her other powerful essays of the 1970s: what were the sources for women’s lives? how did one compare men’s lives with women’s and what criteria did one use to evaluate status? what were the forces affecting change in relations between “the sexes” (“gender relations” as we later came to call them)? What periodization was appropriate when you added in the history of women? Foreword 245

• Joan Kelly’s transition from the world as viewed by Alberti to the world as viewed by Gianozzo’s wife, as she recounted so movingly in the months before her death in 1982, was dramatic, “kaleidoscopic.” She had been active in the women’s movement in the 1960s, but until an extended con- versation with Gerda Lerner at Sarah Lawrence College in 1971, she had not thought of the Renaissance as an arena for exploring the history of women.

Suddenly a new world of learning was open to me. . . . Most questionable was everything I thought I had known about the Renaissance. . . . I knew now that the entire picture I had held of the Renaissance was partial, distorted, limited, and deeply flawed by those limitations. . . . Suppose we look again at this age, the Renaissance, reputed for its liberation from old and con- fining forms, renowned for its revival of classical and republican ideas? Suppose we look at this Renaissance from the vantage point of women?

The essay “Did Women Have a Renaissance?” grew out of the course Kelly taught the next year on “Women, Myth, and Reality” and her collaboration with Gerda Lerner in creating a master’s program in women’s history at Sarah Lawrence. I am struck by how all of us resembled the early genera- tions of Renaissance humanists. We had a thrilling new way to look at the past and our world, seeking not a rebirth (though we did acknowledge antecedents) but an approach that could take history in a better direction. We sought sources by and about women with the energy that humanist scholars had put into finding lost classical manuscripts, and, like them, we quickly shared our finds. We had sodalities for discussion, and friendship was a key in our discoveries, our women’s version of the friendship cel- ebrated by Cicero, Alberti, and Montaigne. As there were women human- ists, so we had male collaborators: I think, for instance, of , who had begun his teaching career at Bryn Mawr and whose Women in Medieval Society appeared in 1971. And like the humanists, we were car- 246 EMWJ 2013, vol. 8 Natalie Zemon Davis rying over traditions and values from the past, certainly in regard to the technical practices of our craft. Joan Kelly’s “Did Women Have a Renaissance?” of 1977 was a splen- did product of this historical renewal. To begin with, it had one of the best titles of all time: just reading that question jolted people out of their customary patterns of thought. Kelly then identified four arenas in which historians should investigate and compare the experience of men and women: the regulation of sexuality; political and economic roles; cultural roles, including education and the shaping of thought; and the ideology and symbolism concerning women and men (gender systems, we would say now). The key historical context for her was the transition from feudal agricultural society with its nobility and medieval princely courts to early capitalistic society with its bourgeoisie and the early modern state. Choosing the regulation of sexuality as her example, Kelly compared the relative sexual freedom and expressiveness of the aristocratic woman, as celebrated in the literature of courtly love and as influenced by the women themselves, with the virtuously chaste married woman of the literature of the bourgeois humanists and of Castiglione, as he celebrated the courtier serving the new Renaissance prince. Both were patriarchal societies, but courtly love offered greater space for the action of upper-class woman, while Neo-Platonic love “mask[ed] and express[ed] the dependency of the Renaissance noblewoman,” itself a version of the dependence of the court- ier on the prince. The division between personal and public life, which Burckhardt had skipped over lightly, was the key for Kelly: “with that rela- tion the modern division of the sexes made its appearance.” “Did Women Have a Renaissance?” was met with excitement when it was published in the widely read collection Becoming Visible, edited by Renate Bridenthal and Claudia Koonz. For those of us already teaching the history of women, it was a rich addition to our seminar discussions. My “Society and the Sexes in Early Modern Europe” was organized around themes that fit well with Kelly’s four criteria (Images of the Sexes; Demography, Sexuality and Family; Work, from Rural to Learned; Religious Life; Political Life); we began the course with Christine de Pizan and the Malleus Maleficarum, and we ended with Mary Wollstonecraft and Jean-Jacques Rousseau). Foreword 247

For those who were not yet aware of gender history, especially those working in medieval or early modern history, Kelly’s essay suggested the immense possibilities of the inquiry. The essay’s value lay less in the precise details of Kelly’s contrast between courtly love and Renaissance ideas of female virtue than in the intellectual agenda she set. Later studies on, say, the Arabic origins of troubadour poetry or on the prosecution of medieval adultery, on the writings of women humanists or on the complex strategies of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Italian families might modify features of Kelly’s comparative argument. The enduring accomplishment of “Did Women Have a Renaissance?” is what it shows about how to do women’s history, about the big questions to ask, and the tools and variables and resources to turn to in trying to answer them. Joan Kelly’s questioning pushes us to think about who had what in the past, to keep shifting our perspective so as to encompass the widened meanings of “universal” in our own time.