The civic and the domestic in Aristotelian thought -- Friendship, concord, and Machiavellian subversion -- Jean Bodin and the politics of the family -- Inclusions and exclusions -- Sovereign men and subjugated women. The invention of a tradition -- Conclusion : from wives to children, from husbands to fathers.

This pioneering and innovative study challenges modern assumptions of what constitutes the political and the public in Renaissance thought. Offering gendered readings of a wide array of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century political thinkers, with a particular focus on the two prime thinkers of the early modern state, Niccolò Machiavelli and Jean Bodin, Anna K. Becker reconstructs a neglected but important classical tradition in political thought. Exploring how 'the political' was incorporated into a wide array of 'private' or 'apolitical' topics by early modern thinkers, Becker demonstrates how both republican and absolutist thinkers - the two poles which organise early modern political thought - relied on gendered justifications. In doing so, she reveals how the foundations of the modern state were significantly shaped by gendered concerns.

The essays in this volume revisit the Italian Renaissance to rethink spaces thought to be defined and certain: from the social spaces of convent, court, or home, to the literary spaces of established genres such as religious plays or epic poetry. Repopulating these spaces with the women who occupied them but have often been elided in the historical record, the essays also remind us to ask what might obscure our view of texts and archives, what has remained marginal in the texts and contexts of early modern Italy and why. The contributors, suggesting new ways of interrogating gendered discourses of genre, identities, and sanctity, offer a complex picture of gender in early modern Italian literature and culture. Read in dialogue with one another, their pieces provide a fascinating survey of currents in gender studies and early modern Italian studies and point to exciting future directions in these fields.

Through detailed historicized and interdisciplinary readings of the performances of Anna Denmark in the Scottish and English Jacobean Courts, Women on the Renaissance Stage fundamentally reassesses women's relationship to early modern performance. It investigates the staging conditions, practices, and gendering of Denmark's performances, and brings current critical theorizations of race, class, gender, space, and performance to bear on the female court of the early 17th century.

Refiguring Woman reassesses the significance of gender in what has been considered the bastion of gender-neutral humanist thought, the Italian Renaissance. It brings together eleven new essays that investigate key topics concerning the hermeneutics and political economy of gender and the relationship between gender and the Renaissance canon. Taken together, they call into question a host of assumptions about the period, revealing the implicit and explicit misogyny underlying many Renaissance social and discursive practices.

This major new collection of essays by leading scholars of Renaissance Italy transforms many of our existing notions about Renaissance politics, economy, social life, religion, medicine, and art. All the essays are founded on original archival research and examine questions within a wide chronological and geographical framework - in fact the pan-Italian scope of the volume is one of the volume's many attractions.Gender and Society in Renaissance Italy provides a broad, comprehensive perspective on the central role that gender concepts played in Italian Renaissance society.

Examines interrelated topics in Medieval and Renaissance Latin literature: the status of women as writers, the status of women as rhetorical figures, and the status of women in society from the fifth to the early seventeenth century.