ABSTRACT
Although the history of women in the United States has been the best-researched area of women’s history over the last twenty years and has thus shaped the dom inant questions and theoretical perspectives of the field to a great degree, studies of women in early m odern Europe have also been very influential in establishing key topics and approaches. The themes of the last four Berkshire Conferences can therefore serve as a way to describe what has hap pened in the field over the last decade, and I would like to use them to explore three questions that have been central in explorations of early m odern European women: Did women have a Reformation? What effects did the development of capitalism have on women? Do the concepts ‘Renaissance’ and ‘early m odern’ apply to women’s experience, and which is more fruitful? All of these questions hark back to the work of Joan Kelly, whose now twenty-year-old essay ‘Did women have a Renaissance?’ continues to be extremely fruitful as a springboard for discussion, both in her period of focus and in times and places far removed.5
