Table Of ContentPRACTICES OF GENDER IN
LATE MEDIEVAL AND
EARLY MODERN EUROPE
LATE MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN STUDIES PRACTICES OF GENDER IN
LATE MEDIEVAL AND
Editorial Board under the auspices of
The Faculty of Arts, University of Melbourne, EARLY MODERN EUROPE
and the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies
Ian Moulton, Chair Arizona State University
Frederick Kiefer University of Arizona
Stephanie Trigg University of Melbourne
Charles Zika University of Melbourne Edited by
Megan Cassidy-Welch and Peter Sherlock
Advisory Board
Jaynie Anderson University of Melbourne
John Cashmere La Trobe University
Megan Cassidy-Welch University of Melbourne
Albrecht Classen University of Arizona
Robert W. Gaston La Trobe University
John Griffiths University of Melbourne
Anthony Gully Arizona State University
Bill Kent Monash University
Anne Scott Northern Arizona University
Juliann Vitullo Arizona State University
Emil Volek Arizona State University
Retha Warnicke Arizona State University
Previously published volumes in this series are listed at the back of the book. H
F
VOLUME 11
LATE MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN STUDIES PRACTICES OF GENDER IN
LATE MEDIEVAL AND
Editorial Board under the auspices of
The Faculty of Arts, University of Melbourne, EARLY MODERN EUROPE
and the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies
Ian Moulton, Chair Arizona State University
Frederick Kiefer University of Arizona
Stephanie Trigg University of Melbourne
Charles Zika University of Melbourne Edited by
Megan Cassidy-Welch and Peter Sherlock
Advisory Board
Jaynie Anderson University of Melbourne
John Cashmere La Trobe University
Megan Cassidy-Welch University of Melbourne
Albrecht Classen University of Arizona
Robert W. Gaston La Trobe University
John Griffiths University of Melbourne
Anthony Gully Arizona State University
Bill Kent Monash University
Anne Scott Northern Arizona University
Juliann Vitullo Arizona State University
Emil Volek Arizona State University
Retha Warnicke Arizona State University
Previously published volumes in this series are listed at the back of the book. H
F
VOLUME 11
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Practices of gender in late medieval and early modern
Europe. - (Late medieval and early modern studies ; v. 11)
1. Women - History - Middle Ages, 500-1500 2. Women -
History - Renaissance, 1450-1600 3. Feminist theory
I. Cassidy-Welch, Megan II. Sherlock, Peter
305.4'0902
CONTENTS
ISBN-13: 9782503523361
List of Illustrations vii
Introduction 1
MEGAN CASSIDY-WELCH AND PETER SHERLOCK
Gender Theory and the Study of Early-Modern Europe 7
MERRY WIESNER-HANKS
Pushing the Boundaries: Argula von Grumbach as a 25
Lutheran Laywoman, 1492–1556/7
PETER MATHESON
A Woman’s Path to Literacy: The Letters of 43
Margherita Datini, 1384–1410
CAROLYN JAMES
Convent Culture in Early-Modern Italy: Laywomen 57
and Religious Subversiveness in a Neapolitan Convent
© 2008, Brepols Publishers n.v., Turnhout, Belgium CAMILLA RUSSELL
Gender, Hybridity, and Violence on the Frontiers 77
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, of Late-Medieval and Early-Modern Ireland
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, DIANNE HALL AND ELIZABETH MALCOLM
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise,
The Queen’s Three Bodies: Gender, Criminality, and 99
without the prior permission of the publisher.
Sovereignty in the Execution of Mary, Queen of Scots
RAYNE ALLINSON
D/2008/0095/126
ISBN: 978-2-503-52336-1 The Royal Art of Conjugal Discord: A Satirical 117
Double Portrait of Francis I and Eleanor of Austria
LISA MANSFIELD
Printed in the E.U. on acid-free paper
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Practices of gender in late medieval and early modern
Europe. - (Late medieval and early modern studies ; v. 11)
1. Women - History - Middle Ages, 500-1500 2. Women -
History - Renaissance, 1450-1600 3. Feminist theory
I. Cassidy-Welch, Megan II. Sherlock, Peter
305.4'0902
CONTENTS
ISBN-13: 9782503523361
List of Illustrations vii
Introduction 1
MEGAN CASSIDY-WELCH AND PETER SHERLOCK
Gender Theory and the Study of Early-Modern Europe 7
MERRY WIESNER-HANKS
Pushing the Boundaries: Argula von Grumbach as a 25
Lutheran Laywoman, 1492–1556/7
PETER MATHESON
A Woman’s Path to Literacy: The Letters of 43
Margherita Datini, 1384–1410
CAROLYN JAMES
Convent Culture in Early-Modern Italy: Laywomen 57
and Religious Subversiveness in a Neapolitan Convent
© 2008, Brepols Publishers n.v., Turnhout, Belgium CAMILLA RUSSELL
Gender, Hybridity, and Violence on the Frontiers 77
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, of Late-Medieval and Early-Modern Ireland
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, DIANNE HALL AND ELIZABETH MALCOLM
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise,
The Queen’s Three Bodies: Gender, Criminality, and 99
without the prior permission of the publisher.
Sovereignty in the Execution of Mary, Queen of Scots
RAYNE ALLINSON
D/2008/0095/126
ISBN: 978-2-503-52336-1 The Royal Art of Conjugal Discord: A Satirical 117
Double Portrait of Francis I and Eleanor of Austria
LISA MANSFIELD
Printed in the E.U. on acid-free paper
Engendering Lust in Early-Modern Italy: 137
Pisanello’s Luxuria
CATHERINE KOVESI
Cornelius Agrippa’s School of Love: Teaching Plato’s 151
Symposium at the Renaissance University
GRANTLEY MCDONALD
‘The richest man in Italy’: Aldo Manuzio 177
ILLUSTRATIONS
and the Value of Male Friendships
ROSA SALZBERG
Women, Work, and Power in the Female Guilds of Rouen 199
SUSAN BROOMHALL
Textile Workers, Gender, and the Organization 215
of Production in the Pre-Industrial Dutch Republic Mansfield
ELISE VAN NEDERVEEN MEERKERK
Figure 1, p. 118. Anonymous (English or French?), Francis I and Eleanor, Queen
Charitable Bodies: Clothing as Charity 235 of France, panel, 81 × 56cm, sixteenth century. The Royal Collection of Her
in Early-Modern Rural England Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, RCIN 403371. Reproduced with permission.
DOLLY MACKINNON
Commemorating a Mortal Goddess: Maria Salviati 261
Kovesi
de’ Medici and the Cultural Politics of Duke Cosimo I
Figure 2, p. 138. Antonio Pisanello, Luxuria, pen and brown ink, 129 × 152mm,
NATALIE TOMAS
c. 1425–39. Vienna, Graphische Sammlung Albertina, inv. 24018r. Repro-
Patriarchal Memory: Monuments in Early-Modern England 279
duced with permission.
PETER SHERLOCK
Figure 3, p. 142. Francesco del Cossa, Triumph of Venus, detail from Month of
Agency, Women, and Witchcraft in Early-Modern England: 301
April, fresco, c. 1469–70. Palazzo Schifanoia, Ferrara. Photograph by Scala,
Rye, 1607–11
Florence. Reproduced with permission.
ELIZABETH KENT
Figure 4, p. 148. Aphrodite Pandemos, agate and onyx cameo, Roman, late Augus-
Reflecting and Creating Gender in Late-Medieval 317
tan period. Museo Nazionale, Naples. Reproduced with permission.
and Early-Modern Europe
MEGAN CASSIDY-WELCH AND PETER SHERLOCK
Sherlock
List of Contributors 327
Figure 5, p. 280. Monument of Thomas and Elizabeth Eyre and monument of
Christopher Eyre, c. 1625. St Thomas’s, Salisbury. Photograph. Reproduced
with permission of the National Monuments Record, English Heritage.
Engendering Lust in Early-Modern Italy: 137
Pisanello’s Luxuria
CATHERINE KOVESI
Cornelius Agrippa’s School of Love: Teaching Plato’s 151
Symposium at the Renaissance University
GRANTLEY MCDONALD
‘The richest man in Italy’: Aldo Manuzio 177
ILLUSTRATIONS
and the Value of Male Friendships
ROSA SALZBERG
Women, Work, and Power in the Female Guilds of Rouen 199
SUSAN BROOMHALL
Textile Workers, Gender, and the Organization 215
of Production in the Pre-Industrial Dutch Republic Mansfield
ELISE VAN NEDERVEEN MEERKERK
Figure 1, p. 118. Anonymous (English or French?), Francis I and Eleanor, Queen
Charitable Bodies: Clothing as Charity 235 of France, panel, 81 × 56cm, sixteenth century. The Royal Collection of Her
in Early-Modern Rural England Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, RCIN 403371. Reproduced with permission.
DOLLY MACKINNON
Commemorating a Mortal Goddess: Maria Salviati 261
Kovesi
de’ Medici and the Cultural Politics of Duke Cosimo I
Figure 2, p. 138. Antonio Pisanello, Luxuria, pen and brown ink, 129 × 152mm,
NATALIE TOMAS
c. 1425–39. Vienna, Graphische Sammlung Albertina, inv. 24018r. Repro-
Patriarchal Memory: Monuments in Early-Modern England 279
duced with permission.
PETER SHERLOCK
Figure 3, p. 142. Francesco del Cossa, Triumph of Venus, detail from Month of
Agency, Women, and Witchcraft in Early-Modern England: 301
April, fresco, c. 1469–70. Palazzo Schifanoia, Ferrara. Photograph by Scala,
Rye, 1607–11
Florence. Reproduced with permission.
ELIZABETH KENT
Figure 4, p. 148. Aphrodite Pandemos, agate and onyx cameo, Roman, late Augus-
Reflecting and Creating Gender in Late-Medieval 317
tan period. Museo Nazionale, Naples. Reproduced with permission.
and Early-Modern Europe
MEGAN CASSIDY-WELCH AND PETER SHERLOCK
Sherlock
List of Contributors 327
Figure 5, p. 280. Monument of Thomas and Elizabeth Eyre and monument of
Christopher Eyre, c. 1625. St Thomas’s, Salisbury. Photograph. Reproduced
with permission of the National Monuments Record, English Heritage.
INTRODUCTION
Megan Cassidy-Welch and Peter Sherlock
his collection of essays originated in a symposium held at Ormond
T
College, University of Melbourne in 2004. The participants in that
symposium presented a vibrant and provocative set of papers around the
theme of gender in early-modern Europe. It is the intellectual synergy between
those papers that we hope to convey in the publication of this volume. We have
included most of the papers presented at that symposium, in revised and
expanded form, together with a number of additional, commissioned essays. We
expanded the chronological parameters to include ‘late-medieval’ in the title of
this book: we understand the time sweep thus named to represent the period
from roughly the fourteenth century through to the early eighteenth century.
There is some regional breadth to the essays here, which range across
western Europe to include Ireland, England, France, the Low Countries, Italy,
and Germany. Italy and England are particularly well-represented. Although
we were keen to promote some regional diversity in this collection, we are also
very aware that ‘Europe’ is a rather nebulous category when applied to early
modernity, and that there are many other areas and regions which are deserving
of study in another volume. We believe, however, that the range of approaches
and subjects contained within these pages well demonstrates the myriad nature
of gender practices in late-medieval and early-modern contexts.
Broadly, there are two purposes to this volume. The first is to explore the
practice of gender in a number of specific historical contexts in order to add to
our understanding of gender construction, representation, and experience. The
second purpose is to explore the idea of gender as an historical practice. How do
we, twenty years after Joan Scott’s invention of gender as a ‘category of historical
analysis’, deploy and imagine that category in our historical writing? To address
these two issues, we have included essays on the basis that they are founded on
2 Megan Cassidy-Welch and Peter Sherlock INTRODUCTION 3
detailed empirical scholarship and that they respond to the idea of gender as a the figure of Giulia Gonzaga just how autonomous, malleable, and complex these
methodological tool. The essays individually add to our specific knowledge of institutions could be. Women could exercise very unexpected and sometimes
people, practice, and place, whilst simultaneously deploying and/or critiquing radical degrees of control in these convents, existing, as they could, in female-
gender as a way of writing the past. defined ‘third spaces’ within.
We begin this collection with an historiographical overview by Merry The fluidity of space might be teased out in quite different contexts, as we see
Wiesner-Hanks who, in erudite and lively fashion, tracks the theoretical and in the essay by Dianne Hall and Elizabeth Malcolm on gender, hybridity, and
methodological shifts in writing gender history over recent decades. Wiesner- violence on the Irish frontiers. Hall and Malcolm show us that women and men
Hanks flags the main preoccupations of gender historians to show just how were responsible for the creation of a ‘middle nation’ in late-medieval Ireland,
intellectually receptive gender history is and can be. Gender history is not only where English and Irish cultures could exist in the same space simultaneously. It
about women, or even men, but is a way of engaging with all social, political, and is through unpacking the historical constructions of hybridization and violence,
cultural contexts. Reading through discourses such as class, colonialism, sexuality, argue Hall and Malcolm, that we can see how masculinist their traditional
nation, and religion with an eye to the embedded nature of gender is both definitions have been. In this instance, gender is not only a useful category of
illuminating and encouraging, according to Wiesner-Hanks. Perhaps, she hopes, historical analysis, but is a crucial means of understanding the social and political
such readings will soon be automatic. formulation of late-medieval Ireland.
Peter Matheson’s essay explores the world inhabited by one Lutheran laywoman, Rayne Allinson also pursues issues surrounding violence, examining space,
Argula von Grumbach. Matheson considers one woman’s extraordinary attempts movement, and imagery to provide a fresh interpretation of the execution of
at protest to argue that — singular as Argula was — ‘the times were against Mary Queen of Scots. Mary’s body, gendered female and labelled criminal, was
her’. Matheson’s conclusions remind us that the categories we often use to write subjected to a well-established ritual in the formal manner of her death at the
gender history, categories such as ‘agency’ or even ‘autonomy’, need to be hands of the English government. Allinson’s detailed reading of the surviving
carefully historicized. This is not to deny the vociferous and resolute nature of accounts of the execution leads her to argue that Mary was not a passive victim
women like Argula; rather, Matheson makes the trenchant observation that our but used clothing, speech, and movement to ‘resist the criminal identity imposed
expectations of female action might not always be reflected in the historical on her by the punishment ritual’. In so doing, she laid the foundations for a
mirror. whole industry dedicated to retelling her story in the roles of female ruler and
Carolyn James continues the theme of ‘agency’ in a careful and insightful martyr and pushed the execution ritual to breaking point.
essay on Margherita Datini. Her analysis of Margherita’s late-medieval letters The gendered representation of power lies at the heart of Lisa Mansfield’s
shows that epistolary writing was a practice to which women were attracted for reading of the double portrait of Francis I of France and his bride Eleanor of
the possibilities it offered their self-expression. Margherita wrote openly and Austria. Probably commissioned by Henry VIII, the satirical image indicates
emotionally to her sometimes bewildered husband, forging a space in which her how even Europe’s most powerful individuals, male rulers, engaged in political
demands were heard and her frustration articulated. James’s essay shows the discourse based on particular notions of and anxieties about masculine sexual
wonderful richness of women’s letter writing, arguing that through the act of behaviour. Marital discord was a chink in the armour of propaganda necessary
correspondence ‘for which [they] were perceived to have a particularly affinity’, to the exercise of authority, and Henry VIII — even if only privately — took the
women provided meaningful insights into the spheres of education, marriage, opportunity to lampoon his French rival.
and emotion, whilst also creating expressive spaces for themselves. Images which drew attention to gendered bodies and behaviours could be
The construction and use of space in an Italian context is also the focus of used to explore not only individual characters and attributes but also abstract
Camilla Russell’s essay on convent culture in Naples during the early to mid- ideas. In Catherine Kovesi’s excellent and provocative analysis of Pisanello’s
sixteenth century. Here, Russell considers the activities of Giulia Gonzaga, a Luxuria we see just how indefinite and unhelpful binary categories of male and
laywoman in a convent, and her connections with religious unorthodoxy. Russell female could be for an artist attempting to depict lust. It is the hermaphroditic
forces us to rethink the nature of female religious houses, demonstrating through and transformative quality of Pisanello’s figure which allowed the artist to denote
