With the current volume the Institute of Art History at the University of Bonn inaugurates a new series of its house publications. The outcome of a symposium, the book brings together scholars working in the disciplines of Romance literature and art history. Its somewhat sweeping title, Women in Early Modern History: Designs for Living in Art and Literature suggests a focus on the relationships between visual or literary artifacts and women's history. However, not all of the ten articles included in the volume actually deal with that rather broad topic. The range of art and literary works discussed reaches from book illustrations in fifteenth-century south Germany to a treatise on the superiority of women published and censored in Italy in the 1620s. The fine article by Silke Segler-Messner is, among other things, a good introduction to the main ideas that guided the perception and construction of female identity in early modern Europe, and in Renaissance Italy in particular. The author points out the destabilizing potential of the one-sex-model as regards traditionalthat is, misogynist-gender discrimination. The anxiety to strengthen and control gender difference led to a kind of male treatise literature that overemphasized the perfection of man and worried about the correct instruction of women. However, more and more women of the Italian upper class were well educated, and some of them entered the gender dispute by way of their own writings. Segler-Messner's readings of texts by Lucrezia Marinella and Moderata Fonte demonstrate the intellectual power of these women, who conceived of female education and the critical spirit as vehicles for changing gender relations.
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