ABSTRACT
Studies of women's writing in early modern Italy are in their infancy, but even within this category of writing there are some discrepancies of interest. Certain nuns refused to allow the enclosure of their bodies to be paralleled by a similar restriction on their minds and writings. One aspect of historical reasoning that has attracted attention is the assertion that it might be possible to isolate female or 'feminine' traits in historical writing, and therefore identify female writers of anonymous historical works such as chronicles. The convent chronicles in this sense fit in with Elisabeth van Houts's argument that one function of women is as preservers of information, although of course the same is also true of male chroniclers. This tradition of oral history, of the old telling the young about the not-too-distant past, may also have acted as a stimulus to budding historians to write.
