Creating Women: Representation, Self-Representation, and Agency in the Renaissance

This interdisciplinary and diverse collection of articles stems from a conference that centred on the idea of creating women. The verbal adjective in the title was meant to signal a dual meaning: women create and women are created by others. What did they create? What was their sense of themselves? How were their identities created in the early modern era? The purpose of the articles here gathered is to explore the fashioning of feminine identity, the social and psychological construct of woman in the early modern age, both from their own perspective and that of others. As in the case of most collaborative projects of this nature, the volume is eclectic and spans, across several centuries, the boundaries of disciplines and theoretical approaches, but the essays are bound together by their common search to defi ne paradigms of femininity in the early modern period.

“This is an excellent collection of essays. As the subtle double meaning of the adjective 'creating' in the title of this volume suggests, these essays explore the multiple ways in which women, whether in royal palaces, convents, patrician mansions, or bourgeois households, shaped and altered the values and discourses of their surroundings.” 

-Giuseppe Mazzotta, Yale University

“The eleven articles in this volume point to women self-fashioning their identity within the social, cultural, religious, and legal constraints of the country and the century in which they lived. I have nothing but praise for the quality of this work. It will fi ll a void in numerous studies on the status of women.” 

-Régine Reynolds-Cornell, Agnes Scott College

MANUELA SCARCI teaches in the Department of Italian Studies and the Renaissance Studies Program at the University of Toronto. Her research interests are in the fi elds of Italian Renaissance, particularly the short story, Renaissance women writers and the representation of women in the literature of early modern Italy, and pedagogy.

REVIEWS
Early Modern Women, 10.1 (2015), pp. 185-188. Reviewed by Maria Teresa Micaela Prendergast.
Parergon, 31.2 (2014), pp. 211-212. Reviewed by Susan Broomhall.
Reformation and Reformation, 37.1 (2014), pp. 175-177. Reviewed by Pina Palma.