Caterina di Jacopo di Benincasa, known as Catherine of Siena, was an Italian mystic and pious laywoman who engaged in papal and Italian politics through extensive letter-writing and advocacy. Canonized in 1461, she is revered as a saint and as a Doctor of the Church due to her extensive theological authorship. She is also considered to have influenced Italian literature.
Vittoria Colonna, marchioness of Pescara, was an Italian noblewoman and poet. As an educated, married noblewoman whose husband was in captivity, Colonna was able to develop relationships within the intellectual circles of Ischia and Naples. Her early poetry began to attract attention in the late 1510s and she ultimately became one of the most popular poets of 16th-century Italy. Upon the early death of her husband, she took refuge at a convent in Rome. She remained a laywoman but experienced a strong spiritual renewal and remained devoutly religious for the rest of her life. Colonna is also known to have been a muse to Michelangelo Buonarroti, himself a poet.
Pietro Aretino was an Italian author, playwright, poet, satirist and blackmailer, who wielded influence on contemporary art and politics. He was one of the most influential writers of his time and an outspoken critic of the powerful. Owing to his communications and sympathies with religious reformers, he is considered to have been a Nicodemite Protestant.
De Mulieribus Claris or De Claris Mulieribus is a collection of biographies of historical and mythological women by the Florentine author Giovanni Boccaccio, composed in Latin prose in 1361–1362. It is notable as the first collection devoted exclusively to biographies of women in post-ancient Western literature. At the same time as he was writing On Famous Women, Boccaccio also compiled a collection of biographies of famous men, De Casibus Virorum Illustrium.
In historiography, querelle des femmes, indicates an early-modern debate on the nature of women. This literary genre developed in Italian and French early humanist circles and was led by numerous women scholars, who wrote in Latin and vernacular to counter dominant misogynistic literature.
Laura Cereta was one of the most notable humanist and feminist writers of fifteenth-century Italy. Cereta was the first to put women’s issues and her friendships with women front and center in her work. Cereta wrote in Brescia, Verona, and Venice in 1488–92, known for her writing in the form of letters to other intellectuals. Her letters contained her personal matters and childhood memories, and discussed themes such as women’s education, war, and marriage. Like the first great humanist Petrarch, Cereta claimed to seek fame and immortality through her writing. It appeared that her letters were intended for a general audience.
Eve is a figure in the Book of Genesis in the Hebrew Bible. According to the origin story of the Abrahamic religions, she was the first woman. Eve is known also as Adam's wife.
Elena Lucrezia Cornaro Piscopia or Elena Lucrezia Corner, also known in English as Helen Cornaro, was a Venetian philosopher of noble descent who in 1678 became one of the first women to receive an academic degree from a university and the first to receive a Doctor of Philosophy degree.
A chopine is a type of women's platform shoe that was popular in the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries. Chopines were originally used as a patten, clog, or overshoe to protect shoes and dresses from mud and street soil.
Protofeminism is a concept that anticipates modern feminism in eras when the feminist concept as such was still unknown. This refers particularly to times before the 20th century, although the precise usage is disputed, as 18th-century feminism and 19th-century feminism are often subsumed into "feminism". The usefulness of the term protofeminist has been questioned by some modern scholars, as has the term postfeminist.
Isotta Nogarola (1418–1466) was an Italian writer and intellectual who is said to be the first major female humanist and one of the most important humanists of the Italian Renaissance. She inspired generations of artists and writers, among them Lauro Quirini and Ludovico Foscarini, and contributed to a centuries-long debate in Europe on gender and the nature of women.
Moderata Fonte, directly translating to Modest Well, is a pseudonym of Modesta di Pozzo di Forzi, also known as Modesto Pozzo, (1555–1592) a Venetian writer and poet. Besides the posthumously-published dialogues, Giustizia delle donne and Il merito delle donne, for which she is best known, she wrote a romance and religious poetry. Details of her life are known from the biography by Giovanni Niccolò Doglioni (1548-1629), her uncle, included as a preface to the dialogue.
Adam and Eve is the title of two famous works in different media by Albrecht Dürer, a German artist of the Northern Renaissance: an engraving made in 1504, and a pair of oil-on-panel paintings completed in 1507. The 1504 engraving depicts Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, surrounded by several symbolic animals. The engraving transformed how Adam and Eve were popularly depicted in art.
Feminism in Italy originated during the Italian Renaissance period, beginning in the late 13th century. Italian writers such as Moderata Fonte, Lucrezia Marinella, and others developed the theoretical ideas behind gender equality. In contrast to feminist movements in France and United Kingdom, early women's rights advocates in Italy emphasized women's education and improvement in social conditions.
Lucrezia Marinella (1571-1653) was an Italian poet, author, philosopher, polemicist, and women's rights advocate. She is best known for her polemical treatise The Nobility and Excellence of Women and the Defects and Vices of Men (1600). Her works have been noted for bringing women into the philosophical and scientific community during the late Renaissance.
Valeria Miani was an Italian playwright noted for her works Celinda, a Tragedy, and Amorosa Speranza. Miani married Domenico Negri in 1593, with whom she had five children, Isabetta, Isabella, Lucretia, Giulio, and Anzolo. Miani is known for being the first woman to publish a tragedy prior to the 18th century. In addition, she was the third woman in Italy to write in the newly popular genre, the pastoral. Miani's works explored themes such as cross-dressing, death and punishment, female virtue, and female resilience.
Marie de Romieu was a 16th-century French poet from Viviers, France. Although her exact date of birth is unknown, she was most likely born between 1526 and 1545, and died around 1589. Like her origins, most of her life remains a mystery. She is mostly known for her poetic discourse on the superiority of women, as well as an attributed French translation of a work by Italian author Alessandro Piccolomini, which provided behavioral and societal instructions for young ladies and their mothers.
Virginia Cox, is a British scholar of Italian literature, culture and history. She is best known for her research on Renaissance and Counter-Reformation Italian literature, the reception of classical rhetorical theory in Italy between the 13th and 16th centuries and Italian early modern women's writing.
Bartolomeo Goggio was an Italian author and notary. He was born in Ferrara circa 1430 and died some time after 1493. He is most recognized for De laudibus mulierum [On the Merits of Women], written in the late 1480s, which was dedicated to Eleanor of Naples, Duchess of Ferrara. Only one surviving manuscript of De laudibus mulierum, held at the British Library, is known to exist. For this work, Goggio is recognized as a contributor to the pro-woman side of the querelle des femmes — "a debate about the nature and worth of women that unfolded in Europe from the medieval to the early modern period". In De laudibus mulierum Goggio argues for the superiority of women. After Eleanor's death, Goggio wrote another philosophical work, De nobilitate humani animi opus.
