Introduction

This introduction summarizes and notes connections among the essays in this collection, which consider women’s agency in the Renaissance and early modern period, an era that saw both increasing patriarchal constraints and new forms of women’s actions and activism. The volume includes thirteen essays by scholars from many disciplines, which analyze people, texts, objects, and images from many different parts of Europe, as well as things and people that crossed the Atlantic and the Pacific. The essays address a capacious set of questions about how women, from their teenage years through older adulthood, asserted agency through social practices, speech acts, legal disputes, writing, viewing and exchanging images, travel, and community building.