[The picture depicts the medieval writer, Christine de Pisan.]
If you would like to explore the feminist/anti-feminist discourses of the period, you might like to delve into what has been known since the fourteenth century as la querelle des femmes (the women's quarrel) discussed here. As the name suggests, it began in France and was especially lively in the sixteenth century when the Renaissance opened up the question of women's intellectual capabilities and the unusually large number of female rulers sparked off a controversy about their fitness to rule (of which more later).
