ABSTRACT
Renaissance Diplomacy was published in 1955, this modern diplomacy was born in the small city-states of late-medieval Italy, and this diplomacy was not suddenly transformed during the Italian Renaissance into the rational, modernizing discipline. Despite the personal tensions and public controversies that female participation in diplomacy generated, women of rank were assumed to be essential players in the Italian and European political scene. To analyse the rapid evolution of European diplomacy in the early modern era, without taking into account the ways in which women acted alone and in partnership with men to shape diplomatic culture, is to tell only part of the story. While the republics of Renaissance Italy endeavoured vigorously to keep patrician women firmly in the domestic sphere, the courts associated with the southern monarchy and the northern principalities were enabling spaces for female participation in many kinds of political activities, including diplomacy.
