Creative Women in Medieval and Early Modern Italy. A Religious and Artistic Renaissance.

This collection of conference essays provides a novel and variegated account of the creativity of women within the restrictions of the roles allowed them by Italian society in the medieval and early modern period - on the one hand setting firmly to rest the idea that such women were 'dead' to the world, and on the other offering a critical assessment of how these constraints affected 'female voices as we hear them in our sources'. As one of the editors says, these constraints can be interpreted negatively or more positively - alla Carolyn Bynum, the dedicatee of the volume - as challenges to be overcome. Most of the women we meet here belong to the latter category, like the …