ABSTRACT
During the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries a woman’s whole existence and her status were determined by two basic factors: gender and belonging to a given social group. The combination of those two determinants was of crucial importance, but a discussion on which of them was the more significant is futile, particularly as the outcome of their ‘mixture’ also depended on a number of smaller factors, including the personality of the woman herself and people from her immediate circle (especially her father and her husband), as well as on the vicissitudes of life and many accidental circumstances.
