The best books about women’s lives in the Renaissance

I loved this book because it’s a biography that reads like a novel and because its subject is a woman who was celebrated in her own time but has been almost totally forgotten since.

In an age when “respectable” women were discouraged from writing and publishing, Vittoria Colonna became one of the most revered poets of the Renaissance, moving in the same circles as popes, princes, writers, and artists.

I love how Targoff brings to life Colonna’s different environments – from the rocky island of Ischia off Naples, where she lived as a newlywed, to the convent where she sought refuge after the death of her husband (who inspired much of her poetry). I also appreciate the nuanced presentation of Colonna’s friendship with Michelangelo, which shows us how influential she was as his spiritual mentor. 

I always appreciate a book that connects Renaissance history to present-day issues – like the never-ending pressure for women to fit a particular standard of beauty. Like us, Renaissance women obsessed over how they looked, how they smelled, their weight, their hair, their makeup (which somehow makes them seem like people we might have been friends with 500 years ago!).

Burke looks at Renaissance beauty culture through the lens of a historian, using sixteenth-century how-to manuals, poems, letters, diaries, and art to think about the impact of Renaissance ideas about beauty and the enduring connection between cosmetics and gender, misogyny, and power.

It’s an entertaining read that’s backed by serious research.

I really enjoyed Leah Chang’s beautifully written Young Queens. It adds a new twist to the “royal biography” genre by tracing the interconnected lives of three women – Catherine de’ Medici, Elisabeth de Valois, and Mary, Queen of Scots – from childhood into adulthood.

Chang has a gift for bringing history to life, interweaving her sources with a sweeping narrative so that you feel like you can hear these women speaking in their own voices. She shows the paradox at the heart of their lives: even at the height of power, these queens were measured by their gender and their bodies, seen as vessels for the future of the state. It’s an important counterbalance to the usual narrative of royal history.

I wanted to include this book because it focuses not only on women in the Renaissance but on the particular experience of a Jewish woman living and writing in seventeenth-century Venice.

Even though the Venetian republic proclaimed justice and equality, those ideals did not extend to women nor to the thousands of Jews and other non-Christians who made their home in the city. As a Jewish woman, Sarra Copia Sulam had to navigate prejudice and suspicion on two fronts, yet she courageously defended herself and her faith in print.

The book does a wonderful job of showing how Sulam used her dexterous pen to take on her critics, and Westwater’s account reveals new biographical information about Sulam, her family, and Jewish life in the Renaissance.

This older, quieter novel by Sarah Dunant has stayed with me over the years. It tells the story of a young Italian woman forced into a convent after a clandestine love affair. This was the fate of thousands of Renaissance women, whether or not they had a religious vocation: convents were repositories for “surplus” women who couldn’t be respectably married off.

I appreciate how this book focuses on the surprising complexity of the cloister, from the friendships and enmities among the nuns to their incredible knowledge and expertise in music and medicine.

Dunant’s books about Renaissance Italy are always well-researched, and she has a flair for integrating small details that bring this hidden world to life.