Renaissance Influence On Women

The sheer beauty of the Renaissance through art and the eloquence of the written word tend to bring about a positive response in thought. With works by Giovanni Boccaccio, Geoffrey Chaucer, William Shakespeare, Sir Walter Raleigh and the many romantic descriptions of love this era offers, it is easy to overlook the true depiction of a woman’s place in society. The beauty of the word and the art of the times are first to the mind when hearing the word Renaissance. Not permitted to hold political office or even vote, some women were kept hidden from all forms of a social life. Possessions of their parents and later of their husbands, taught as a whole that their main place in the world was to serve their husbands, to bring children into the

The books themselves are written to be used as guide books on correct etiquette. They tend to speak rather kindly about women but eventually the same speaker will use words like, the weaker sex or inferior, or bring up that a woman’s place is in marriage and then to serve her husband in all manners that he feels is needed. The focus of this study is to bring to the forefront what is really expected of a woman, to show the confusion of the times by use of their own words as they declare a woman equal and then rapidly change the meaning of the word

Women were owned by their parents from birth, sometimes given to marriages at early ages, often marriages to men that they did not love nor want to be with. If no match was made for a woman she was not permitted to live on her own but forced to live with a male family member or to join a nunnery. While laws and rules of women continued to stand harshly in the way of women’s rights from the 14th and on through much of the 17th century, the Renaissance or rebirth opened up a new way of thinking. In the book The Columbia History of the World. the definition of the word Renaissance is “a perfectly neutral sense to denote a particular period of time, roughly the years from the Black Death in the middle of the fourteenth century to the early seventeenth century” , it also states “that it was the only period in the history of Italy between antiquity and the nineteenth century when Italians controlled their own political