Mary Hays and learned women in the Renaissance

This chapter disambiguates the name of Isabella de Rosares and Isabella de Josa and it analyses the role of these Spanish ladies in the development of women's learning both in Spain and in Italy. In Mary Hays's Female Biography a very brief biography of a Spanish woman was found: Isabella de Rosares preached in the great church of Barcelona in Spain. In the late nineteenth-century Isabel de Rosares and Isabel de Josa appear again together, and are praised in a Spanish Catholic publication issued in Madrid in 1889, in an anonymous article entitled 'Elocuencia de las mujeres' (The eloquence of women). It describes the significant female contribution to the education of women and to the history of the Western world and also how women's abilities proved instrumental in different periods and various areas of knowledge.