Renaissance Women

Church: nuns
• Poverty, chastity, obedience
• Ideal of spiritual poverty: St Clare of Assisi
(1194 –1253)
 St Catherine of Siena (1347 – April 29,
1380)
• Mystical marriage (hearts); stigmata;
levitation
St. Catherine’s writing and traveling
• Letters
• Influence on the Pope
• "The Dialogue of Divine Providence"
(dialogue between a soul who "rises up" to
God and God himself)
• Ate very little
Beccafumi, Domenico, Stigmatization of Saint
Catherine, c. 1518
 St. Teresa of Avila (1515-1582)
• I saw in angel’s hand a long spear of gold, and at the
iron's point there seemed to be a little fire. He appeared
to me to be thrusting it at times into my heart, and to
pierce my very entrails; when he drew it out, he seemed
to draw them out also, and to leave me all on fire with a
great love of God. The pain was so great, that it made
me moan; and yet so surpassing was the sweetness of
this excessive pain, that I could not wish to be rid of it.
The soul is satisfied now with nothing less than God. The
pain is not bodily, but spiritual; though the body has its
share in it. It is a caressing of love so sweet which now
takes place between the soul and God, that I pray God
of His goodness to make him experience it who may
think that I am lying.
 Beguines (ca. 14 century)
th

• Northern towns mostly

• Women who share residence and work
together
• Informal vows
• Devotio moderna
 St Guglielma of Milan (d. August 24, 1281)

• (some has come) to

believe that
Guglielma was no
less than the Holy
Spirit herself,
incarnate in the form
of a woman..
 Heresy of the Brethren of the Free
Spirit (ca. 13th-14th century)
• God is in everything
• Man could achieve a union with God which
meant that he could no longer sin and was
above all human authority: "Father rejoice with
me, I have become God... When I looked into
myself I saw God within me and everything he
has ever created in heaven and earth... I am
established in the pure Godhead, in which there
never was form or image."
 Brethren of the Free Spirit
• "Moreover, the godlike man operates and begets the
same that God operates and begets. For in God he
worked and created heaven and earth. He is also the
generator of the eternal word. Nor can God do anything
without this man. The god-like man should, therefore,
make his will conformable to God's will, so that he should
will all that God wills. If, therefore, God wills that I should
sin, I ought by no means to will that I may not have
sinned. This is true contrition. And if a man have
committed a thousand mortal sins, and the man is well
regulated and united to God, he ought not to wish that he
had not done those sins; and he ought to prefer suffering
a thousand deaths rather than to have omitted one of
those mortal sins.
 Brethren of the Free Spirit
• Sister Catherine Treatise (mystical death)
• 1310, Marguerite Porete's The Mirror of
Simple Souls, : the "Annihilated Soul" is
one that has given up everything but God
through Love and is unable to sin.
• In your nature, • [Annihilated Soul] is
• eternal Godhead, so enflamed in the fire
• I shall come to know of Love that she has
my nature. become properly fire,
which is why she
• And what is my
feels no fire. For she
nature, boundless is fire in herself
love? through the power of
• It is fire, Love who transforms
• because you are her into the fire of
nothing but a fire of Love…
love…
 Women in the world
• Many children
• Infanticide
• Abandonment
• Foundling hospitals
 Ospedale degli Innocenti
• “Children were sometimes abandoned in a
basin which was located at the front
portico. However, this basin was removed
in 1660 and replaced by a wheel for secret
refuge. There was a door with a special
rotating horizontal wheel that brought the
baby into the building without the parent
being seen.”
 Marriage
• Marriage laws began to evolve during the Renaissance.
The Council of Westminster decreed in 1076 that no
man should give his daughter or female relative to
anyone without priestly blessing. Later councils would
decree that marriage should not be secret but held in the
open. But it wasn't until the 16th century Council of Trent
that decreed a priest was required to perform the
betrothal ceremony. Separation of couples was
tolerated, but there was no legal divorce, though
betrothals between those too closely related could be
annulled.
• In Florence, however, the entire ceremony remained
secular until the 16th century.
 Wedding feast
• Flatware was not used until the 17th
century, so people still ate with their
fingers. Spoons were shared for soups
and such, while forks were used
occasionally for serving purposes
 Flowers
• The element that makes wedding flowers of the Renaissance
unique, was
the prominent use of herbs and wheat. Rosemary,
thyme, basil, sage,
chives, lavender, parsley, and even garlic were
often seen in bouquets
interspersed with wheat and the chosen flowers
that were available to the
bride. Wheat, considered symbolic of fertility,
played a vital role in
marriage ceremonies and was viewed much as rice
is in weddings today.
The use of herbs originated from what was then
believed to be the
• mystical, even religious, significance of various
herbs and flowers in both
health and destiny.
 Women’s professions
• Manufacturers
• Hostel owners
• Blacksmiths
• Shop keepers
• Servants and housekeepers: St. Zita of
Lucca (1218-1278, April 27)
• and many others
 Prostitutes
• Treated as practitioners of a recognized
profession
• Catalogue of All the Principle and Most
Honored Courtesans of Venice (1570)
listed 215.
Gaspara Stampa 1523-1554
 Rime 28
• When before those eyes, my life and light,
my beauty and fortune in the world, I stand,
the style, speech, passion, genius I command,
the thoughts, conceits, feelings I incite,
in all I'm overwhelmed, utterly spent,
like a deaf mute, virtually dazed, all reverence, nothing
but amazed
in that lovely light, I'm fixed and rent.
•
Enough, not a word can I intone
for that divine incubus never quits
sapping my strength, leaving my soul prone.
Oh Love, what strange and wonderful fits:
one sole thing, one beauty alone,
can give me life and deprive me of wits.
 ***
• Every planet above, and every star,
Gave my lord their powers at his birth:
Each one gave him of their special worth,
To make a single perfect mortal here.
Saturn gave him depths of understanding,
Jupiter for fine actions gave desire,
Mars a greater skill than most in warfare,
Phoebus, elegance and wit in speaking.
Venus beauty too, and gentleness,
Mercury eloquence, but then the moon
Made him too cold for me, in iciness.
Each of these graces, each rare boon,
Make me burn for his fierce brightness,
And yet he freezes, through that one alone.
 Rime 43
• Harsh is my fortune, but harsher still is the fate
dealt me by my count: he flees from me,
I follow him; others long for me,
I cannot look at another man's face.
I hate him who loves me,love him who scorns me;
against the humble lover, my heart rebels,
but I am humble to him who kill my hope;
my soul longs for such harmful food.

He constantly gives me cause for anger,

while others seek to give me comfort and peace;
these I ignore, and I cling instead to him.

Thus in your school, Love, we receive

always the opposite of what we deserve:
the humble are despised, the heartless rewarded.
 ***
• I swear to you, Love, by your arrows,
And by your powerful holy flame,
I care not if by one I’m maimed,
My heart burned, wasted by the other:
However far through times past or coming,
There never was nor will be woman
Whomever of them you wish to name,
Could know such sharpness, such devouring:
For there’s a virtue born from suffering,
That dims and conquers the sense of pain,
So that it’s barely felt, seems scarcely hurting.
No! This, that torments soul and body again,
This is the real fear presaging my dying:
What if my fire be only straw and flame?
 Rime 132
• When in my weeping I inquire of Love
(Who so unwillingly gives ear to me)
A thousand times a day---never just once---
Why he will wound and pierce me all the time:
•
"How can it be, since I gave heart and soul
To him, the day I took them both from me,
If everything enclosed within his breast
Is only joy and laughter, never sorrow,
•
How can I feel cold jealousy and fear
And be deprived of all my joyfulness,
Living in him, and never in myself?"

• "I bid you die to joy and live in grief,"

Love answers me in his hard final sentence,
"Let this suffice you, that it makes you write."
 Rilke, Duino Elegy 1 (1922)
• Have you remembered
• Gastara Stampa sufficiently yet, that any girl,
• whose lover has gone, might feel from that
• intenser example of love: ‘Could I only become like her?’
• Should not these ancient sufferings be finally
• fruitful for us? Isn’t it time that, loving,
• we freed ourselves from the beloved, and, trembling,
endured
• as the arrow endures the bow, so as to be, in its flight,
• something more than itself? For staying is nowhere.
Properzia de Rossi (1490-1530):
Joseph and Potiphar’s wife
Sofonisba Anguissola (1531-1626):
Portrait of Bernardino Campi
Artemisia Gentileschi (1593-1659): Judith
 Fede Galizia (1578 - 1630)
• It is rumored that she spent a good portion of her life
looking for something in Italy and Greece. She must
have found something incredible because a 2 ton load of
something was sent back to her summer home in Spain.
Lavinia Fontana (1552-1614) Portrait of Antonietta
Gonsalus