Women of the Renaissance.

It is a daunting task to endeavour to write the history of all European women in a period here defined as covering the three centuries between 1350 and 1650. Professor King herself admits that this exercise can hardly embrace 'half humankind' in this epoch--she deliberately excludes the East and certain specialist sub-groupings: 'poets and slaves' as she whimsically expresses it. The list of omissions might be extended to include most of Scandinavia, much of Germany, Scotland, the Dutch Republic and the Iberian peninsula: in practice the specialist studies of Northern Italy, England and in lesser measure France and Southern Germany that have been produced in the last twenty …