She married in at the age of fifteen, and was widowed ten years later. Much of the impetus for her writing came from her need to earn a living to support her mother, a niece, and her two surviving children.
She spent most of her childhood and all of her adult life in Paris and then the abbey at Poissy, and wrote entirely in her adopted language, Middle French. Certain scholars have argued that she should be seen as an early feminist who efficiently used language to convey that women could play an important role within society.
Christine de Pizan: A painting of Christine de Pizan, considered by some scholars to be a proto-feminist, lecturing four men. Christine de Pizan was born in in Venice, Italy. In this atmosphere, Christine was able to pursue her intellectual interests. But she did not assert her intellectual abilities, or establish her authority as a writer, until she was widowed at the age of In order to support herself and her family, Christine turned to writing.
By , she was writing love ballads, which caught the attention of wealthy patrons within the court. These patrons were intrigued by the novelty of a female writer and had her compose texts about their romantic exploits.
Her output during this period was prolific. Between and she composed over ballads, and many more shorter poems. Written in the 13th century, The Romance of the Rose satirizes the conventions of courtly love while critically depicting women as nothing more than seducers.
She argued that these terms denigrated the proper and natural function of sexuality, and that such language was inappropriate for female characters such as Madam Reason. According to her, noble women did not use such language. Her critique primarily stemmed from her belief that Jean de Meun was purposely slandering women through the debated text. She continued to counter abusive literary treatments of women. Christine produced a large amount of vernacular works in both prose and verse.
Her works include political treatises, mirrors for princes, epistles, and poetry. Her early courtly poetry is marked by her knowledge of aristocratic custom and fashion of the day, particularly involving women and the practice of chivalry. Her early and later allegorical and didactic treatises reflect both autobiographical information about her life and views and also her own individualized and Humanist approach to the scholastic learned tradition of mythology, legend, and history she inherited from clerical scholars, and to the genres and courtly or scholastic subjects of contemporary French and Italian poets she admired.
Supported and encouraged by important royal French and English patrons, she influenced 15th century English poetry. In this particular text, Christine argues that women must recognize and promote their ability to make peace between people. This ability will allow women to mediate between husband and subjects. She argued that rhetoric is a powerful tool that women could employ to settle differences and to assert themselves. She offers advice to governesses, widows, and even prostitutes.
He has often been called the founder of modern political science. He was for many years a senior official in the Florentine Republic, with responsibilities in diplomatic and military affairs. He also wrote comedies, carnival songs, and poetry. His personal correspondence is renowned in the Italian language. He was secretary to the Second Chancery of the Republic of Florence from to , when the Medici were out of power. He wrote his most renowned work, The Prince Il Principe in Machiavelli described immoral behavior, such as dishonesty and killing innocents, as being normal and effective in politics.
However, the shift from the Vulgate Bible to the English Bible shows how English society greatly influenced the evolution of the book in general. Structure of Literary Works: Quartos and Folios. Between the s and the s works of literature were published in quartos and folios. The structure of how literary works was published is revealing of the contents of the literary works. We normally find plays and poetry in quartos or octavos , small volumes which had four or eight pages printed on each side of a sheet which was then folded twice or three times and stitched together with other such folded sheets to form the book.
Despite the prominence and esteem of folios they were in fact a later development in the publishing industry than quartos. Shakespeare published fifteen of his thirty seven plays in quartos before his works were published in the folio of Lounsbury Passages found in one would not be found in the other.
The Printing Press Circulation of these religious texts and folios was made possible because of the development of the printing press. Before the invention, readers created personal anthologies by reproducing manuscripts by hand Norton The rewriting process was both tedious and risky; texts could easily lose their authenticity and be altered. The printing press did not solve all of the difficulties in the book industry because the technology was new and errors were made, but it was the first step in increasing readership and establishing writers.
The invention of the printing press transformed society by making information and literature more available. However, it took time for the printing press to develop the book industry and distribute texts throughout society. William Caxton was determined to learn the art of printing so that he could sell books in English to the English nobility.
The first book that Caxton printed was his translation of The History of Troy , which was finished in or Not only was this the first printed book to be in circulation in England, but it was also the first book printed in English.
At this point, Caxton was still in Cologne, Germany. This is a reflection of how Caxton printed what was in demand and what the people in power wanted.
Once Caxton established the printing press in England, writers began to sell their manuscripts to the printer for a low price Norton Unlike today, these printers legally owned the texts that they printed Norton However, the printers were not the only ones that created the books.
After the work on the printing press was done, the book in progress was sent to specialists, who worked to emphasize certain aspects of the pages. Illuminators inserted formal initials, and rubricators added text by hand in red. Furthermore, the books were intentionally made to look like manuscripts, with intricate type faces that appeared like handwriting First Impressions.
The process was time consuming and involved numerous contributors, yet the printers were the ones who literally marked the printed books with their name. The Renaissance also saw within it a period known as the Age of Discovery, where voyagers launched expeditions to travel the globe, discovering whole new shipping routes to the Americas, India and the Far East, influencing our ideas further.
Religion, of course, was still a dominant power, but with more people learning to read, write and interpret ideas, they began to closely examine and critique religion as they knew it. Art is one of the most discussed sections of the Renaissance era. With famous artists such as Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael, Botticelli, and Donatello all producing their famous masterpieces during this era.
Leonardo da Vinci, although an inventor, scientist, writer and more, is most famous for his incredible world-famous paintings, such as the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper. Other incredible renaissance men that were talented in astronomy, philosophy, writing, and exploration include household names Galileo, Shakespeare, and Columbus.
A theme which modern scholars find so interesting about the era is that art and science seemed to fuse together, almost seamlessly at times. Da Vinci, for example, incorporated scientific principles such as anatomy into their work, so he could recreate the human body with extraordinary precision.
Artists also incorporated techniques like perspective into their work to add to their realism, adding depth and emotion. To see evidence of this wonderfully important and staggering era, head to Italy, the birthplace of High Renaissance. As the era was set in Europe, your best bet is to travel there!
Why did the Medici want to commission a painting for a certain chapel or a certain political building? If we understand that, we get a heightened sense of what the painting is about. Baxandall is also interested in other material issues. Once you start to understand that, you start to see the social dimension of the painting, and how it functions, and in particular, its connection to religion.
In the later sections of his book, he talks about gesture. So it almost serves a didactic purpose: a reminder to the faithful of their religious commitment? Exactly, yes. We just see it cold and seek to impose our own values upon it. Why has that painting survived and why are we still sustained by it? They still have an powerful afterlife. Baxandall has a huge influence on a tradition over the last thirty years that talks about the biography of a painting.
When we talk about the biography of a life, we start at birth and we end at death. We can look at the way that a painting from a church in southern Italy has been moved to a palace in northern Europe.
I still teach it on my MA in Renaissance Studies. To me it remains very fresh and powerful. Students are fascinated by it and really engage with it. First, you can go and look for any remaining evidence about how it was commissioned and who commissioned it.
Also, how did people talk about it in the period? You can then go and find out what virility means in this period. Baxandall is far more than just somebody interested in the social history of art. He takes you back to that moment and draws you into that world. I was also struck by the socio-economic context in which these paintings were created.
He is interested in understanding how trade influenced art. People are looking at that picture and gaining not only aesthetic but also social satisfaction from it. The materials were important, but he goes on to describe how artistry was replacing these precious materials like gold-leaf and lapis lazuli as a marker of value in society. Baxandall is writing in the s when Stephen Greenblatt, the author of my second choice, is also starting to develop his work.
They take a very similar approach in thinking about culture, society, and the place of the arts within it. But as opposed to the great artwork that we get in the fifteenth century, Greenblatt is interested in the great literature that comes out of the late 16th and early 17th century. Greenblatt wrote a book on Walter Raleigh in the mids but the great book he wrote is Renaissance Self-Fashioning in Like Baxandall he argues that we need to move between an understanding of the elite and the non-elite, and talk about what we have previously seen as marginal figures.
Before the late s, people had not really talked about the presence of women in the Renaissance. The focus was always great white men like Leonardo, Michelangelo, Shakespeare, Montaigne. What Greenblatt does is follow the way Renaissance people start to fashion their identity. He argues that the self is always fashioned. We are never born fully-formed as selves.
What that creates somewhat paradoxically is a flourishing of the self and of great literature. You mentioned Shakespeare and we find many examples in his stories of mistaken identity, of masquerade, of the self as being somehow constructed or fashioned. You also talked about Renaissance people. They were motivated by things that we would recognise in our own time, like conspicuous consumption. It remains one of the most influential crossover books on the Renaissance by an academic writing for a broader audience.
Jardine was my academic mentor and I did the research for the book. She was my professor and we used to joke that she became my surrogate Jewish mother. She was, again, someone who was coming out of the humanist tradition. She read Greek and Latin and worked on archival sources from the High Renaissance.
What we see in this period is the birth of modernity, as we understand it today, as late modern or postmodernists. These works of art are created under very specific historical conditions but something about those conditions allows us to connect with them.
For Jardine, even things like the creation of manuscripts or printed books are driven by very specific commercial and financial imperatives. Again, merchants are crucial figures.
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