Florentine Or Ottoman: Women of the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries

Many if not most students come into a European history course, even on the college level, believing the Renaissance was a time of individualism, secularization, and liberation from traditional social strictures for women as well as for men. At the same time, students generally also assume that European Christian women were inherently freer than Muslim women.  Both assumptions are reinforced by media representations of the Muslim Middle East and popular literature about the Renaissance.  These two assumptions are deeply intertwined, as the “script” of Western history is written to describe an arc of continual progress towards freedom, albeit with the occasional setback, in contrast to the continual backwardness of the Muslims in this arena.

This presentation offers several activities and readings from Renaissance Florence and the Ottoman Empire of the 15^th and 16^th centuries to challenge these notions. Primary sources, from samples of sumptuary laws and contemporary descriptions to reproductions of portraits from both societies, form the basis of an activity in which students are asked to identify which documents [all unidentified by source] belong to which society and evaluate the reasons for their choices.  The actual identifications are usually quite surprising to students, which in and of itself effectively challenge their presumptions. Additional readings deepen the comparison of the legal and actual status of women in Florence and Istanbul in the 15th and 16^th centuries. Returning their focus to Europe, students evaluate Joan Kelly-Gadol’s pivotal 1977 article, “Did Women Have a Renaissance” with excerpts from Italian humanists on the proper role of women in society and short biographies of Italian Renaissance women humanists and artists.  At the end of this unit, students will have, a greater appreciation of the nuanced and complex position of both Muslim women in the Ottoman Empire and Christian women in Renaissance Italy.