The Lost Tapestries of the City of Ladies

The Lost Tapestries of the City of Ladies PDF Author: Susan Groag Bell
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520928787
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 294

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Book Description
Like a particularly good detective story, this richly textured book follows tantalizing clues in its hunt for a group of missing artistic masterpieces. Susan Bell recounts both her long search for a series of sixteenth-century tapestries that celebrated women and her efforts to understand their meaning for Queen Elizabeth I of England and the other powerful women who owned them. Opening a new window on the lives of noblewomen in the Renaissance, the brilliantly colored tapestries that were the ultimate artistic luxury of the day, and the popular and influential fourteenth-century writer Christine de Pizan, Bell pursues a compelling tale that moves from centuries past to today. The tapestries around which this story revolves are linked to Christine de Pizan's Book of the City of Ladies (1405), orginally published six hundred years ago in 1405. The book is a tribute to women that honors two hundred female warriors, scientists, queens, philosophers, and builders of cities. Though twenty-five manuscripts of the City of Ladies still exist, references to tapestries based on the book are elusive. Bell takes us along as she tracks down records of six sets of tapestries whose owners included Elizabeth I of England; Margaret of Austria; and Anne of Brittany, Queen of France. Bell examines the intriguing details of these women's lives—their arranged marriages, their power, their affairs of state—asking what interest they had in owning these particular tapestries. Could the tapestries have represented their thinking? As she reveals the historical, linguistic, and cultural aspects of this unique story, Bell also gives a fascinating account of medieval and early-Renaissance tapestry production and of Christine de Pizan's remarkable life and legacy.

The Lost Tapestries of the City of Ladies

The Lost Tapestries of the City of Ladies PDF Author: Susan G. Bell
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520234103
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 286

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Book Description
Susan Bell recounts her thirty-year search for tapestries based on Christine de Pizan's City of Ladies (1405) that were listed as possessions of 16th C. European rulers, mostly women.

The Lost Tapestries of the City of Ladies

The Lost Tapestries of the City of Ladies PDF Author: Susan Groag Bell
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520928787
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 294

Get Book Here

Book Description
Like a particularly good detective story, this richly textured book follows tantalizing clues in its hunt for a group of missing artistic masterpieces. Susan Bell recounts both her long search for a series of sixteenth-century tapestries that celebrated women and her efforts to understand their meaning for Queen Elizabeth I of England and the other powerful women who owned them. Opening a new window on the lives of noblewomen in the Renaissance, the brilliantly colored tapestries that were the ultimate artistic luxury of the day, and the popular and influential fourteenth-century writer Christine de Pizan, Bell pursues a compelling tale that moves from centuries past to today. The tapestries around which this story revolves are linked to Christine de Pizan's Book of the City of Ladies (1405), orginally published six hundred years ago in 1405. The book is a tribute to women that honors two hundred female warriors, scientists, queens, philosophers, and builders of cities. Though twenty-five manuscripts of the City of Ladies still exist, references to tapestries based on the book are elusive. Bell takes us along as she tracks down records of six sets of tapestries whose owners included Elizabeth I of England; Margaret of Austria; and Anne of Brittany, Queen of France. Bell examines the intriguing details of these women's lives—their arranged marriages, their power, their affairs of state—asking what interest they had in owning these particular tapestries. Could the tapestries have represented their thinking? As she reveals the historical, linguistic, and cultural aspects of this unique story, Bell also gives a fascinating account of medieval and early-Renaissance tapestry production and of Christine de Pizan's remarkable life and legacy.

The Prison of Love

The Prison of Love PDF Author: Emily C. Francomano
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1442630531
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 333

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Book Description
The Spanish romance Cárcel de amor blossomed into a transnational and multilingual phenomenon that captivated audiences throughout Europe at a time when literacy was expanding and print production was changing the nature of reading, writing, and of literature itself. In The Prison of Love, Emily Francomano offers the first comparative study of this sixteenth-century work as a transcultural, humanist fiction. Blending literary analysis and book history, Francomano provides us with the richly textured history of the translations, material books, and artefacts that make this tale of love, letters, and courtly intrigue an invaluable prism through which the multifaceted world of sixteenth-century literary and book cultures are refracted.

A History of Women's Political Thought in Europe, 1400-1700

A History of Women's Political Thought in Europe, 1400-1700 PDF Author: Jacqueline Broad
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521888174
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 347

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Book Description
alike." --Book Jacket.

The Woman Question in France, 1400–1870

The Woman Question in France, 1400–1870 PDF Author: Karen Offen
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 131699161X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
This is a revolutionary reinterpretation of the French past from the early fifteenth century to the establishment of the Third Republic, focused on public challenges and defenses of masculine hierarchy in relations between women and men. Karen Offen surveys heated exchanges around women's 'influence'; their exclusion from 'authority'; the increasing prominence of biomedical thinking and population issues; concerns about education, intellect, and the sexual politics of knowledge; and the politics of women's work. Initially, the majority of commentators were literate and influential men. However, as more and more women attained literacy, they too began to analyze their situation in print and to contest men's claims about who women were and should be, and what they should be restrained from doing, and why. As urban print culture exploded and revolutionary ideas of 'equality' fuelled women's claims for emancipation, this question resonated throughout francophone Europe and, ultimately, across the seas.

Following Chaucer

Following Chaucer PDF Author: Lynn Staley
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472131877
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 233

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Book Description
Following Chaucer: Offices of the Active Life explores three representative figures—the royal woman, the poet, and the merchant—in relation to the concept of “office,” which Cicero linked to the health of the republic, but Chaucer to that of the common good. Not usually conjoined to the term “office,” these three figures, situated in the active life, were not firmly mapped onto the body politic, which was used to figure a relational and ordered social body ruled by the king, the head. These figures are points of entry into a set of questions rooted in Chaucer’s understanding of his cultural and historical past and in his keen appraisal of the social dynamics of his own time that also reverberate in the centuries after Chaucer’s death. Following Chaucer does not trace influence but uses Chaucer’s likely reading, circumstances, and literary and social affiliations as guides to understanding his poetry, within the context of late medieval English culture and the reshaping of the concept of these particular offices that suited the needs of a future whose dynamics he anticipated. His understanding of the importance of the Ciceronian concept of office within the active life, his profound cultural awareness, and his probing of the foundations of social change provide him with a keen sense of the persistent tensions and inconsistencies that are fundamental to his poetry.

Pens and Needles

Pens and Needles PDF Author: Susan Frye
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812206983
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 339

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Book Description
The Renaissance woman, whether privileged or of the artisan or the middle class, was trained in the expressive arts of needlework and painting, which were often given precedence over writing. Pens and Needles is the first book to examine all these forms as interrelated products of self-fashioning and communication. Because early modern people saw verbal and visual texts as closely related, Susan Frye discusses the connections between the many forms of women's textualities, including notes in samplers, alphabets both stitched and penned, initials, ciphers, and extensive texts like needlework pictures, self-portraits, poetry, and pamphlets, as well as commissioned artwork, architecture, and interior design. She examines works on paper and cloth by such famous figures as Elizabeth I, Mary, Queen of Scots, and Bess of Hardwick, as well as the output of journeywomen needleworkers and miniaturists Levina Teerlinc and Esther Inglis, and their lesser-known sisters in the English colonies of the New World. Frye shows how traditional women's work was a way for women to communicate with one another and to shape their own identities within familial, intellectual, religious, and historical traditions. Pens and Needles offers insights into women's lives and into such literary texts as Shakespeare's Othello and Cymbeline and Mary Sidney Wroth's Urania.

Incest and Agency in Elizabeth's England

Incest and Agency in Elizabeth's England PDF Author: Maureen Quilligan
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812203305
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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Book Description
Maureen Quilligan explores the remarkable presence in the Renaissance of what she calls "incest schemes" in the books of a small number of influential women who claimed an active female authority by writing in high canonical genres and who, even more transgressively for the time, sought publication in print. It is no accident for Quilligan that the first printed work of Elizabeth I was a translation done at age eleven of a poem by Marguerite de Navarre, in which the notion of "holy" incest is the prevailing trope. Nor is it coincidental that Mary Wroth, author of the first sonnet cycle and prose romance by a woman printed in English, described in these an endogamous, if not legally incestuous, illegitimate relationship with her first cousin. Sir Philip Sidney and his sister, the Countess of Pembroke, translated the psalms together, and after his death she finished his work by revising it for publication; the two were the subject of rumors of incest. Isabella Whitney cast one of her most important long poems as a fictive legacy to her brother, arguably because such a relationship resonated with the power of endogamous female agency. Elizabeth Carey's closet drama about Mariam, the wife of Herod, spends important energy on the tie between sister and brother. Quilligan also reads male-authored meditations on the relationship between incest and female agency and sees a far different Cordelia, Britomart, and Eve from what traditional scholarship has heretofore envisioned. Incest and Agency in Elizabeth's England makes a signal contribution to the conversation about female agency in the early modern period. While contemporary anthropological theory deeply informs her understanding of why some Renaissance women writers wrote as they did, Quilligan offers an important corrective to modern theorizing that is grounded in the historical texts themselves.

Representing the Life and Legacy of Renée de France

Representing the Life and Legacy of Renée de France PDF Author: Kelly Digby Peebles
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030691217
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 410

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Book Description
This book considers the life and legacy of Renée de France (1510–75), the youngest daughter of King Louis XII and Anne de Bretagne, exploring her cultural, spiritual, and political influence and her evolving roles and actions as fille de France, Duchess of Ferrara, and Dowager Duchess at Montargis. Drawing on a variety of often overlooked sources – poetry, theater, fine arts, landscape architecture, letters, and ambassadorial reports – contributions highlight Renée’s wide-ranging influence in sixteenth-century Europe, from the Italian Wars to the French Wars of Religion. These essays consider her cultural patronage and politico-religious advocacy, demonstrating that she expanded upon intellectual and moral values shared with her sister, Claude de France; her cousins, Marguerite de Navarre and Jeanne d’Albret; and her godmother and mother, Anne de France and Anne de Bretagne, thereby solidifying her place in a long line of powerful French royal women.

Urban Space in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Age

Urban Space in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Age PDF Author: Albrecht Classen
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
ISBN: 3110223902
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 769

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Book Description
Although the city as a central entity did not simply disappear with the Fall of the Roman Empire, the development of urban space at least since the twelfth century played a major role in the history of medieval and early modern mentality within a social-economic and religious framework. Whereas some poets projected urban space as a new utopia, others simply reflected the new significance of the urban environment as a stage where their characters operate very successfully. As today, the premodern city was the locus where different social groups and classes got together, sometimes peacefully, sometimes in hostile terms. The historical development of the relationship between Christians and Jews, for instance, was deeply determined by the living conditions within a city. By the late Middle Ages, nobility and bourgeoisie began to intermingle within the urban space, which set the stage for dramatic and far-reaching changes in the social and economic make-up of society. Legal-historical aspects also find as much consideration as practical questions concerning water supply and sewer systems. Moreover, the early modern city within the Ottoman and Middle Eastern world likewise finds consideration. Finally, as some contributors observe, the urban space provided considerable opportunities for women to carve out a niche for themselves in economic terms.