Question

Jacob Burckhardt’s view that Renaissance European women “stood on a footing of perfect equality” with Renaissance men has been repeatedly cited by feminist scholars as a prelude to their presentation of rich historical evidence of women’s inequality. In striking contrast to Burckhardt, Joan Kelly in her famous 1977 essay, “Did Women Have a Renaissance?” argued that the Renaissance was a period of economic and social decline for women relative both to Renaissance men and to medieval women. Recently, however, a significant trend among feminist scholars has entailed a rejection of both Kelly’s dark vision of the Renaissance and Burckhardt’s rosy one. Many recent works by these scholars stress the ways in which differences among Renaissance women—especially in terms of social status and religion—work to complicate the kinds of generalizations both Burckhardt and Kelly made on the basis of their observations about upper-class Italian women.
The trend is also evident, however, in works focusing on those middle- and upper-class European women whose ability to write gives them disproportionate representation in the historical record. Such women were, simply by virtue of their literacy, members of a tiny minority of the population, so it is risky to take their descriptions of their experiences as typical of “female experience” in any general sense. Tina Krontiris, for example, in her fascinating study of six Renaissance women writers, does tend at times to conflate “women” and “women writers,” assuming that women’s gender, irrespective of other social differences, including literacy, allows us to view women as a homogeneous social group and make that group an object of analysis. Nonetheless, Krontiris makes a significant contribution to the field and is representative of those authors who offer what might be called a cautiously optimistic assessment of Renaissance women’s achievements, although she also stresses the social obstacles Renaissance women faced when they sought to raise their “oppositional voices.” Krontiris is concerned to show women intentionally negotiating some power for themselves (at least in the realm of public discourse) against potentially constraining ideologies, but in her sober and thoughtful concluding remarks, she suggests that such verbal opposition to cultural stereotypes was highly circumscribed; women seldom attacked the basic assumptions in the ideologies that oppressed them.

The author of the passage discusses Krontiris primarily to provide an example of a writer who _______?

A. is highly critical of the writings of certain Renaissance women
B. supports Kelly’s view of women’s status during the Renaissance
C. has misinterpreted the works of certain Renaissance women
D. has rejected the views of both Burckhardt and Kelly
E. has studied Renaissance women in a wide variety of social and religious contexts

Answer 1

Answer: The right answer is the D) has rejected the views of both Burckhardt and Kelly.

Explanation: Just to elaborate a little on the answer, it can be added that option A can be unhesitatingly discarded, since Krontiris is NOT critical of the writings of those Renaissance women. In addition, she has only studied women from a specific social group, so option E can also be discarded. Furthermore, she does not support Kelly’s view of women’s status during the Renaissance, since she is one of those authors who offer "a cautiously optimistic" assessment of Renaissance women’s achievements, and Kelly did not think that way, so option B is incorrect. Finally, option C is also incorrect, since she has not misinterpreted the works of certain Renaissance women, although, according to the author of this review, she has tended to extrapolate women writers' experiences to those of women who were not writers, "allowing us to view women as a homogeneous social group."

Through her work, Krontiris exemplifies the "significant trend among feminist scholars" that has "entailed a rejection of both Kelly’s dark vision of the Renaissance and Burckhardt’s rosy one."