ON WOMANHOOD DURING THE RENAISSANCE

by Anonymous

INTRODUCTION

In modern-day America, the life of a woman is not altogether so different from the life of

a man. She can attend school and university, climb the corporate ladder, own a house and

property, and hold positions of power in much the same way that a man might. Although there’s

still progress to be made, many men in the modern day wonder, What are they so mad

about? and while sexism in the modern day may be more difficult to pinpoint, sexism in the past

isn’t. I believe that we cannot understand the pernicious, deeply embedded institutions in place

in our society without understanding the past of those institutions. Thus, I intend to provide a

disquisition on womanhood during the Renaissance, beginning with the period of childhood.

Before we enter into the life of a woman in the Renaissance, though, the question should

be asked: how do we know women lived so differently than men? I mean, did they really? And

what about the differences in class—surely upper-class women had more privileges afforded

them than their working-class counterparts? Historian Joan Kelly, whose article “Did Women

Have a Renaissance?” I’ll be quoting a few times, wrote, “The state, early capitalism, and the

social relations formed by them impinged on the lives of Renaissance women in different ways

according to their different positions in society. But the startling fact is that women

as a group, especially among the classes that dominated Italian urban life, experienced a

contraction of social and personal options that men of their classes either did not, as was the

case with the bourgeoisie, or did not experience as markedly, as was the case with the nobility.”

She continues on to say that “The bourgeois writings on education, domestic life, and society

constitute the extreme in this denial of women's independence. Suffice it to say that they sharply

distinguish an inferior domestic realm of women from the superior public realm of men,

achieving a veritable ‘renaissance’ of the outlook and practices of classical Athens, with its
domestic imprisonment of citizen wives.”

GIRLHOOD & THE MENSTRUAL CYCLE

Philippe Aries, a prominent medieval scholar during the 1960s and ‘70s, argued that “in

medieval society, the idea of childhood did not exist,” and this axiom held true for the

Renaissance Era. In the company of adults, children were expected to be seen and not heard,

and girls, who were often viewed as little more than a pleasant thing to look at, had it especially

difficult. Baby girls were often disappointments, especially in royal families where sons were

more ideal. With an infancy that was all too short and a childhood usually filled with various

plagues and pains, young girls were expected to help their mother in the house by the age of

seven or eight, with the hope of gaining enough skills in house-tending to be married by their

teens. If a girl could not or did not marry, she would most likely be sent to live in a convent as a

nun, because if she couldn’t do right by a man, she could at least do right by God.

It’s interesting that a girl would be expected to act as a woman, with all the requirements

of having a husband—including engaging in sexual intercourse—at such a young age, when in

fact, girls physically became women much later during the Renaissance. Because of the

increase in average weight, a girl in modern times is likely to get her period by age 12 or even

earlier; during the Renaissance, this age was around 15 or 16, and sometimes older if the girl

was underfed. According to the novel Women’s Bodies: A Social History, “The peasant girls… in

general menstruate much later than the daughters of the townsfolk or the aristocracy, and

seldom before their seventeenth, eighteenth or even twentieth year.”

The existence of the period was seen as embarrassing by almost all women and

shameful by the church. Back in the Middle Ages, the stigma around a menstruating woman

was so great that it was thought a woman on her period would get others around her sick, and

that anyone with a period was intrinsically diseased. While periods were slightly more
understood in the Renaissance, slightly is the key word; menstruating women were still seen as

sordid and unclean. There were many wives’ tales about what menstrual blood could do,

including but not limited to: make fruit fall from trees, give dogs rabies, kill bee hives, dull

mirrors, kill crops, turn wine sour, and damage the penis on contact. It is perceptions like these

that, albeit amusing, are what gave periods and menstruation the stigma we’re trying to break

free from today.

MARRIAGE

The menstrual cycle wasn’t the only thing that is vastly different in the modern day.

Another age-old irritation that’s changed quite a bit since the Renaissance is the institution of

marriage.

Legally, boys could marry at 14 and girls could marry at 12, but girls were most often much

younger than their husbands. To quote the website Italian Renaissance Learning Resources,

“The large number of very young brides corresponded to a large number of widows. Children of

men who died remained in the man’s home and a part of his extended family; his wife did not.

Instead, widows returned to the control of their own families.” An unknown source specializing in

Renaissance weddings further discusses the all-too-common age gap by stating, “The groom's

average age is at least fourteen years older than their brides… Noble women were generally

married off before they were nineteen. For a woman not to be married over the age of twenty-

four was rare.” This means that it was quite possible for a fifteen-year-old bride to have a thirty-

year-old husband, to whom she would owe every kindness and comfort—more on that later.

Because of the nature of marriage as an alliance, involving family and status and several

other rather idiotic factors, girls were frequently married off to whomever was the best fit for the

family. In the event of a particularly undesirable bride, a girl would be married to whoever would
take her. The Collector states that “women and marriage were seen as a type of currency,” and

the novel Daily Life in Renaissance Italy posits that “marriage was the only legitimate means to

secure women’s honor and extend the family into the next generation… Marrying off children”—

note the use of the word children here, and not women—“thus extended the family’s

connections and secured its honor.”

In addition to providing the bride, the bride’s family was expected to supply a dowry to

the husband and his family upon the marriage, which meant that the family would give clothes,

jewelry, money, or even property to the husband. This was supposedly to help the newlyweds

prepare for their new household, but I think the brides’ families were probably just paying for

men to get rid of their daughters.

Once women were married, they went from belonging to their fathers to belonging to

their husbands—literally. The expectations placed on the woman depended on her social class,

but although a higher class may have afforded her slightly more power, a woman was still

almost always under the jurisdiction of the head of household “senior male,” who, once married,

was the husband. One source stated that “Not only was the wife subordinate; she was also

insecure, for she was a perpetual outsider in her husband’s home.”

A woman was expected to maintain a proper and pleasant home for her husband;

fifteenth-century patrician Francesco Barbaro wrote, “There are three things that, if they are

diligently observed by a wife, will make marriage praiseworthy and admirable: love for her

husband, modesty of life, and diligent and complete care in domestic matters.” He continued on

to add about the “faculty of obedience, which is her master and companion, because nothing is

more important… than this.” So, essentially, the happiness of the marriage was largely

dependent on the wife, and her husband’s unhappiness, if present, would probably have been

blamed on her.
 PREGNANCY & CHILDBIRTH

Somewhat like today, the next step after marriage was, naturally, pregnancy and

childbirth. With the vows of abstinence that were encouraged during single life now broken by

the vows of marriage, husbands and wives were mostly free to attempt to conceive children.

Indeed, attempting conception was seen as the only appropriate reason to have sex with one’s

wife, and childbirth was probably the only instance where a woman was treated as if she had

any importance, because obviously, men cannot carry children.

Most places during the Renaissance had particular “conception rituals,” which women

would engage in when they wanted to conceive successfully. Almost all of these included

praying—a plainly unoriginal idea—but some were downright strange. According to Heather

Teysko of the Renaissance English History podcast, “There was a meadow in Bury St.

Edmunds, in Suffolk, where up until the 15th century a white bull was kept for use in the town’s

conception ritual. The bull would be led by the monks at Bury St. Edmunds in a procession from

the meadow, and the women who wanted to conceive would accompany the bull, stroking its

sides, until they reached the gates of the Abbey. At that point they would enter the church and

make prayers and offerings to St. Edmund.”

Pregnancy was frequent and generally unpleasant. Many didn’t stick, but extended

“mourning periods” for stillbirths were uncommon. Even if a pregnancy was successful, because

of the number of children people had in those days—usually ten to fifteen, of which one or two

would survive to adulthood—women were expected to have another child as soon as she and

her husband, or just her husband, wished, which was usually right after. One source wrote, “It is

completely plausible that married Renaissance women spent the majority of their

premenopausal lives with child.”

As I stated before, pregnancy was generally unpleasant. When a woman reached her

third trimester—if she did—she remained at home in a ritual called confinement. During

confinement, the windows were drawn and the woman was isolated from everyone, save the
women who may have stayed around her—no men were allowed, except for the occasional

doctor or priest, who obviously could only be male. Women only emerged back into the world

about a month after giving birth, after they had been thoroughly “purified” through ritual or

churchgoing. Giving birth itself was its own kind of hell; it’s estimated that, in 16th and 17th

Century England, one out of every forty women died in childbirth. In fact, women usually wrote

their wills during pregnancy in case they died giving birth, and unlike today, if it came down to

the life of the baby or the life of the mother, the mother’s life was usually attempted to be saved

first.

Probably the most altered institution between the Renaissance period and the modern

day is sex. According to Sexual Relations In Renaissance Europe by Garn LeBaron Jr.,

“Enduring sexual relationships and marriages often began with violent seductions that could

legally be classified as rape. Consequently, the rape of young women of marriageable age

received the lightest punishment of any sexual crime.” As an example, in the case of a knight

who desired a peasant girl, theorist and author Andreas Capellanus advised the knight "not [to]

hesitate to take what you seek and to embrace her by force.” This goes all the way back to

established gender roles, which historian Joan Kelly wrote, “establish[ed] chastity as the female

norm and restructure[d] the relation of the sexes to one of female dependency and male

domination.”

SEX & PROSTITUTION

Indeed, marriage was often viewed as a solution to “binding men’s passions,” as there

were only certain ways in which a man should have sex with his wife, and he should only do so

with the intention of having children. Sex, like many other things at the time, was seen as taboo.

The church attempted to control it by subscribing to certain ideals; it followed closely the writings

of Saint Thomas Aquinas, who said that women were designed for union with men, but that men
were clearly superior. Aquinas also outlined that marriage was only useful for two reasons: it

allowed children to be conceived without sin, and it kept men from being too promiscuous.

We know this didn’t really work because, believe it or not, brothels and prostitution were

quite popular at the time—and interestingly enough, the church had no intention of banning

them. In fact, the church itself created a number of brothels, because they thought that by

containing these evils in one area, the evil would be kept from spreading to the wider world.

Aquinas’s opinion likely affected their decisions in these cases; he compared prostitution to a

sewer in a palace, and said, “Take away the sewer, and you will fill the palace with pollution…

Take away prostitutes from the world and you will fill it with sodomy.” Another notable saint,

Saint Augustine, said that to remove prostitutes was to “pollute all things with lust.” To

quote Emerging from the Shadows: Prostitution in the Italian States During the Renaissance by

Sarah Glassford, “Officially sanctioned prostitution offered an outlet for [men’s] sexual energies,

and it was in the interests of a Christian society to offer such an outlet.” Prostitutes often lived

and died in disgrace and were seen by scholars and the majority of good society as scum, but

at least these women were making their own living—even if they did, in some backhanded way,

still rely on men for their sustenance.

SOCIAL EXPECTATIONS

But wait—there’s more. Let’s talk a little bit about the social expectations of women in

the Renaissance and why those sucked, too. Back to Joan Kelly—she wrote in her essay “Did

Women Have a Renaissance?” that “culture is an accomplishment for noblewoman and man

alike, used to charm others as much as to develop the self. But for the woman, charm had

become the primary occupation and aim. Whereas the courtier's chief task is defined as the

profession of arms, ‘in a Lady who lives at court a certain pleasing affability is becoming above

all else, whereby she will be able to entertain graciously every kind of man.’” This kind of gentle

servitude mixed with just the right amount of friendliness and mystique was the ideal state of a
married woman, especially a noblewoman; she was expected to be polite and civil at all times

and know how to entertain guests and fulfill their whims.

That also means that wives were expected to host “salons” in their homes if their

husbands so desired—and while they weren’t called such at the time, the vastly popular

“intellectual meetings” of the Enlightenment—the period after the Renaissance—did take place

during the later years of the Renaissance. In accordance with every other expectation placed on

women at the time, in the event that a wife could remain in the company of the men discussing

their ideas, theories, and what have you, she was expected to stay silent and agree demurely. It

was not “becoming” of a woman to speak her mind; a proper woman lacked spirit, demonstrated

civility and docility, and agreed with whomever was speaking. In the rare cases that she was

asked her opinion, she should state the least controversial option in as few words as possible,

or refrain from responding at all. For upper class women, these rules were slightly more lax; it

was occasionally possible for a woman of good social standing to state her legitimate opinion on

a topic, but it was also not uncommon for the men around her to laugh at or belittle her opinions,

particularly if they didn’t respect her very much or had had one too many glasses of ale.

CONCLUSION

The good news is that women weren’t the only ones who had it badly in the past. From

the societies of the ancient Greeks and Romans where gladiators could be torn apart by lions,

to the Aztec tribes where the most beautiful people were offered as sacrifices and tossed in

volcanoes, to the Medieval period in which doctors administered medicine via bloodsucking

leech, certain parts of history have always sucked. The detrimental nature of the way women

have been treated historically is different because it is, and has been, an ongoing problem, and

not a one-off issue that would be fixed when people learned better, as with bloodletting or

sacrificial rituals.
 So what is it that has kept women in their place for all these years? Why have they

almost always been on the bottom, in social hierarchies, in ranks of importance and in bed?

Without going back to religion and the idea of woman being created from Adam’s rib—an

argument that Thomas Aquinas used in his disquisitions on women as the lesser sex—it seems

to me that the men of the ancient world simply didn’t realize that women were the same as they

were. Women were seen as weak-willed, pathetic, and foolish; though few and far between,

women that were strong-willed were labeled shrewd, brazen, and crazy, and often would not be

listened to despite the veracity of their arguments.

That’s not to say that men should get a pass for their bad behavior, but men, just like

women, were conditioned to believe certain things about the opposite sex. The reason we’ve

seen so many changes in regards to the general opinion of women in the past century are due

to widespread societal changes; individual women have shown their capabilities to the wider

world, but more than that, women have banded together to dissipate the negative influence of

the sexist ideas that pervaded history, and shown that not only are we just as capable in almost

all areas as men are, but that we were not made to just be housewives, cooks, servants, and

mothers—we can be anything.

WORKS CITED

Joan, Kelly. “Did Women Have a Renaissance?” Women, History, and Theory: The Essays of
Joan Kelly, University of Chicago Press, 1984, pp. 175-197.

Ariès, Phillipe. Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life, trans. Robert Baldick, A
Vintage Giant, 1960, pp. 125.
Rhoades, Tiffany. “A Girl in Renaissance Europe.” Girl Museum Inc., 23 May
2014, https://www.girlmuseum.org/a-girl-in-renaissance-europe/.

Moss, Gabrielle. “The Average Age Women Got Their First Period Throughout
History,” Bustle, 2 Oct 2015, https://www.bustle.com/articles/114490-the-average-age-women-
got-their-first-period-throughout-history.

Shorter, Edward. Women's Bodies: A Social History of Women's Encounter with Health, Ill-
Health and Medicine. Taylor & Francis, 10 Nov 2017, pp. 18-19.

Chapa, Hector. “Menses Through the Millennia: The Strange History of Menstruation Through
the Ages,” LinkedIn, 5 Apr 2017, https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/menses-through-millennia-
strange-history-menstruation-hector.

Oxford University Press. “Husbands and Wives,” Italian Renaissance Learning

Resources, 2024,http://www.italianrenaissanceresources.com/units/unit-2/essays/husbands-
and-wives/.

Iacob, Anisia. “The Role of Women During the Italian Renaissance,” The Collector, 20 Nov
2021, https://www.thecollector.com/role-of-women-in-italian-renaissance/.

Cohen, Elizabeth S, and Thomas V. Cohen. Daily Life in Renaissance Italy, Greenwood, 30
Sept 2001, pp. 200-320.

Barbaro, Francesco. The Wealth of Wives: A Fifteenth-Century Marriage Manual, ed. and trans.
Margaret L. King, Iter Academic Press, 2015, pp. 175.

Teysko, Heather. “Pregnancy And Childbirth In Renaissance England,” Renaissance English

History Podcast, ep. 24, Acast, 29 Dec
2014, https://www.englandcast.com/2017/04/englandcast-024-pregnancy-and-childbirth-in-
renaissance-england/.

Lebaron Jr., Garn. “Sexual Relations In Renaissance Europe,” Wordpress, 9 May

2010. https://garnlebaron.wordpress.com/2010/05/09/sex_in_renaissance_europe/.
Glassford, Sarah. “Emerging From the Shadows: Prostitution in the Italian States During the
Renaissance, 1380-1620,” The Mirror Undergraduate History Journal, ed. 39, January 2002, pp.
105-127, https://journals.scholarsportal.info/browse/07115911/v22i0001.