Includes bibliographical references and index.

Did women have a Renaissance? / Joan Kelly -- Women humanists : education for what? / Lisa Jardine -- The housewife and the humanists / Lorna Hutson -- The tenth muse : gender, rationality, and the marketing of knowledge / Stephanie Jed -- The notion of woman in medicine, anatomy, and physiology / Ian Maclean -- Women on top / Natalie Zemon Davis -- The "cruel mother" : maternity, widowhood, and dowry in Florence in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries / Christiane Klapisch-Zuber -- Witchcraft and fantasy in early modern Germany / Lyndal Roper -- Diana described : scattered woman and scattered rhyme / Nancy J. Vickers -- Literary fat ladies and the generation of the text / Patricia Parker -- Margaret Cavendish and the romance of contract / Victoria Kahn -- Surprising fame : renaissance gender ideologies and women's lyric / Ann Rosalind Jones -- Women on top in the pamphlet literature of the English Revolution / Sharon Achinstein -- La donnesca mano / Fredrika Jacobs -- Guilds, male bonding, and women's work in early modern Germany / Merry Wiesner -- Language, power, and the law : women's slander litigation in early modern London / Laura Gowing -- Finding a voice : Vittoria Archilei and the Florentine "new music" / Tim Carter.