ABSTRACT
By participating in the humanist movement as it emerged in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Italy, women took part in a community of learning essential to the development of Renaissance civilization and consequential for the evolving intellectual life of modem Europe. Women constituted a small minority among humanists; yet their participation was significant. There were perhaps a dozen who could easily be named; perhaps another twenty, less visible, could be identified; others perhaps existed whose identities will elude us; perhaps three, in these centuries, were famous. But their significance is not in numbers. Only a few learned women continued to write—and presumably to labor at their studies—after the brilliant years of youth. Nogarola's literary ambitions had exposed her to the envy and hostility of her sex. Laura Cereta, too, was the object of fierce criticism by women.
