This is a critical edition of Books II and III of Juan Luis Vives, De Institutione Feminae Christianae, with facing English translation, full critical apparatus and pertinent commentary. It is the most-important treatise of the Renaissance on the education of women, with far-reaching influence through the centuries.
Vives’ tract on the education of Women, De Institutione Feminae Christianae (1524, revised 1538) became a model for cunduct books in various Protestant traditions and as such has always been of interest to historians of education. However, the treatise also made a very important contribution to the querelle des femmes of its time and has consequently generated much interest among modern historians of women and gender. It consists of 3 books, one for each stage of woman’s life –maidenhood, marriage and widowhood. The only English translation of the text on offer till now was the inaccurate and free version of Richard Hyrde (a friend of Thomas More), published early in the 20th century by Foster Watson, but now unavailable. De Institutione Feminae Christianae, 2, contains the critical edition of the Latin text of Books II and III with a double apparatus and a facing-page English translation with notes. It starts with a special introduction to this edition. Volume 1 covering Book 1 was published in 1996. By publishing the 2nd volume the complete text of this important treatise by Vives is now available.
The extraordinarily diverse oeuvre of Juan Luis Vives, marked by great erudition and originality, still remains very little known in the English-speaking world. This collection of essays considers his life and the influence of his writings, and examines some of his chief works. These include his books on the education of women and on the relief of the poor, his numerous political writings, and his huge encyclopedic treatise, De disciplinis, a comprehensive critical and systematic review of universal learning and the state of the academic disciplines at the beginning of the sixteenth century. Subsequent chapters discuss Vives's ideas on the soul, especially his analysis of the emotions, his contribution to rhetoric and dialectic and a posthumous defense of the Christian religion in dialogue form. Contributors are Enrique Gonzalez Gonzalez, Catherine Curtis, Peter Mack, Valerio Del Nero, Edward V. George.
Though portraits of old women mediate cultural preoccupations just as effectively as those of younger women, the scant published research on images of older women belies their significance within early modern Italy. This study examines the remarkable flowering, largely overlooked in portraiture scholarship to date, of portraits of old women in Northern Italy and especially Bologna during the second half of the sixteenth century, when, as a result of religious reform, the lives of women and the family came under increasing scrutiny. Old Women and Art in the Early Modern Italian Domestic Interior draws on a wide range of primary visual sources, including portraits, religious images, architectural views, prints and drawings, as well as extant palazzi and case, furnishings, and domestic objects created by the leading artists in Bologna, including Lavinia Fontana, Bartolomeo Passerotti, Denys Calvaert, and the Carracci. The study also draws on an array of historical sources - including sixteenth-century theories of portraiture, prescriptive writings on women and the family, philosophical and practical treatises on the home economy, sumptuary legislation, books of secrets, prescriptive writings on old age, and household inventories - to provide new historical perspectives on the domestic life of the propertied classes in Bologna during the period. Author Erin Campbell contends that these images of unidentified women are not only crucial to our understanding of the cultural operations of art within the early modern world, but also, by working from the margins to revise the center, provide an opportunity to present new conceptual frameworks and question our assumptions about old age, portraiture, and the domestic interior.
"From meetings and conversation with men, love affairs arise. In the midst of pleasures, banquets, dances, laughter, and self-indulgence, Venus and her son Cupid reign supreme. . . . Poor young girl, if you emerge from these encounters a captive prey! How much better it would have been to remain at home or to have broken a leg of the body rather than of the mind!" So wrote the sixteenth-century Spanish humanist Juan Luis Vives in a famous work dedicated to Henry VIII's daughter, Princess Mary, but intended for a wider audience interested in the education of women. Praised by Erasmus and Thomas More, Vives advocated education for all women, regardless of social class and ability. From childhood through adolescence to marriage and widowhood, this manual offers practical advice as well as philosophical meditation and was recognized soon after publication in 1524 as the most authoritative pronouncement on the universal education of women. Arguing that women were intellectually equal if not superior to men, Vives stressed intellectual companionship in marriage over procreation, and moved beyond the private sphere to show how women's progress was essential for the good of society and state.
The Profession of Widowhood explores how the idea of ‘true’ widowhood was central to pre-modern ideas concerning marriage and of female identity more generally. The medieval figure of the Christian vere vidua or “good” widow evolved from and reinforced ancient social and religious sensibilities of chastity, loyalty and grief as gendered ‘work.’ The ideal widow was a virtuous woman who mourned her dead husband in chastity, solitude, and most importantly, in perpetuity, marking her as “a widow indeed” (1 Tim 5:5). The widow who failed to display adequate grief fulfilled the stereotype of the ‘merry widow’ who forgot her departed spouse and abused her sexual and social freedom. Stereotypes of widows ‘good’ and ‘bad’ served highly-charged ideological functions in pre-modern culture, and have remained durable even in modern times, even as Western secular society now focuses more on a woman’s recovery from grief and possible re-coupling than the expectation that she remain forever widowed. The widow represented not only the powerful bond created by love and marriage, but also embodied the conventions of grief that ordered the response when those bonds were broken by premature death. This notion of the widow as both a passive memorial to her husband and as an active ‘rememberer’ was rooted in ancient traditions, and appropriated by early Christian and medieval authors who used “good” widowhood to describe the varieties of female celibacy and to define the social and gender order. A tradition of widowhood characterized by chastity, solitude, and permanent bereavement affirmed both the sexual mores and political agenda of the medieval Church. Medieval widows—both holy women recognized as saints and ‘ordinary women’ in medieval daily life—recognized this tradition of professed chastity in widowhood not only as a valuable strategy for avoiding remarriage and protecting their independence, but as a state with inherent dignity that afforded opportunities for spiritual development in this world and eternal merit in the next.
The Puritans believed that godly marriages were foundational for the future life of families, churches, and nations. Therefore, they wrote prolifically on the subject of marriage, seeking to bring biblical reformation to this subject in a comprehensive way. Martin Luther, John Calvin, and other previous Reformers had begun this task, but the Puritans took it much further, writing a number of detailed treatises on how to live as godly spouses. Out of the wealth of material available to us from the seventeenth century, Joel R. Beeke and James A. La Belle have gathered together insights from the past and summarized them in a contemporary form in order to encourage modern day coupled to glorify God in marriage. Table of Contents: 1.The Institution and Honor of Marriage 2. The Purposes and Benefits of Marriage 3. Securing a Good Entrance into Marriage 4. Preserving the Honor of Marriage 5. The Mutual Duties of Love and Chastity 6. The Mutual Duties of Help and Peace 7. The Wife's Duties in Marriage 8. The Husband's Duty of Love 9. The Husband's Duty of Authority 10.Concluding Counsel Appendix: George Swinnock's Prayers for Husbands and Wives
