Download Forum: Revisiting Joan Kelly`s “Did Women Have a Renaissance

Early Modern Women:
An Interdisciplinary Journal
2013, vol. 8
Forum: Revisiting Joan Kelly’s
“Did Women Have a Renaissance?”
Foreword
Natalie Zemon Davis
T
he word “Renaissance” seemed full of promise as a term for periodization 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 Jacob Burckhardt’s
Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, where we met some striking upperclass 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 centuries 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 Middle Ages 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 amazing 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 categories, 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 provide 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 historian 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 accordance 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 dissertation 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
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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 doctoral 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 United States,” 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 conversation 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 confining 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 generations 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 celebrated by Cicero, Alberti, and Montaigne. As there were women humanists, so we had male collaborators: I think, for instance, of David Herlihy,
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-
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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 splendid 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 courtier on the prince. The division between personal and public life, which
Burckhardt had skipped over lightly, was the key for Kelly: “with that relation 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.