Abstract
The cultural dominance of classical literature during the Renaissance established an exclusively masculinist cast to the study of history. Knowledge of a small corpus of classical texts created a cultural hegemony that regulated elite education and determined entrance into the law, the church and the civil service for 500 years. The ‘classical’ education saw women largely excluded from intellectual life, based as it was on an ideal of public life drawn from ancient Athens and Rome. This classical ideal was ideologically underpinned by a gendered notion of separate spheres. Not only were women denied the possibility of a classical education, but that very education reinforced the belief that the exclusion of women who from the public sphere was ‘morally correct’ and ‘in accordance with the whole tradition of western civilisation’.1 From the Renaissance onwards male scholars held a particular scorn for women who usurped the masculine privilege of a classical education and used the historical representation of women in classical texts to argue against the education of women and their entrance into the public sphere.
There is no more significant pointer to the character of a society than the kind of history it writes or fails to write.
E. H. Carr, What is History, 1961
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Notes
Barbara Caine, Victorian Feminists (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 39.
Euan Cameron, ‘The Power of the Word: Renaissance and Reformation’, in Early Modern Europe: An Oxford History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 72.
Barbara F. McManus, Classics and Feminism: Gendering the Classics (New York: Twayne, 1997) p. 2.
Walter J. Ong, ‘Latin Language Study as a Renaissance Puberty Rite’, Studies in Philology, 57, 2 (1959): 105.
Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine, From Humanism to the Humanities: Education and the Liberal Arts in Fifteenth- and Sixteenthcentury Europe (London: Duckworth, 1986), p. 4.
Joseph Levine, Humanism and History: Origins of Modern English Historiography (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987), p. 74.
T.S. Eliot, ‘What is a Classic?’, in On Poetry and Poets (London: Faber, 1957), p. 67.
Donald R. Kelley, Faces of History from Herodotus to Herder (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), p. 134.
E. B. Fryde, Humanism and Renaissance Historiography (London: Hambledon Press, 1983), p. 4.
Donald R. Kelley, Versions of History from Antiquity to the Enlightenment (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), p. 218.
Peter Burke, The Renaissance Sense of the Past: Documents of Modern History (London: Edward Arnold, 1969), pp. 50–76.
Phyllis Rackin, Stages of History: Shakespeare’s English Chronicles (New York: Cornell University Press, 1990), p. 8.
Donald R. Kelley, ‘Humanism and History’, in Albert Rabil Jr (ed.), Renaissance Humanism: Foundations, Forms and Legacy, Vol. 3, Humanism and the Disciplines (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988), p. 241.
Richard Schlatter (ed.), Hobbes’s Thucydides (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1975), p. 6.
Peter Burke, ‘A Survey of the Popularity of Ancient Historians 1450–1700’, History and Theory 5 (1966): 136.
Eric Cochrane, Historians and Historiography in the Italian Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), p. 3.
Arnaldo Momigliano, ‘The Introduction of the Teaching of History as an Academic Subject and its Implications’, Minerva 21, 1 (1983): 2–3.
A. Dwight Culler, The Victorian Mirror of History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), p. 4.
Arthur Marwick, The Nature of History (London: Macmillan, 1970), p. 26.
T. J. Luce, The Greek Historians (London: Routledge, 1997), p. 125.
J. B. Bury, The Ancient Greek Historians (New York: Dover, 1958), p. 197.
Arthur Eckstein, Moral Vision in the Histories of Polybius (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), p. 118.
David Harvey, ‘Women in Thucydides’, Arethusa 18, 1 (1985): 70. Other historians suggest there are fifty references to women.
Book 2, 45.2. J. S. Rusten, Thucydides: The Peloponnesian War, Book II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 175.
Frank M. Turner, The Greek Heritage in Victorian Britain (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), p. 187.
T]he chief glory of a woman is not to be talked of,“ said Pericles, himself a much talked of man’. Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (London: Hogarth, 1929), p. 76.
T. E. Page et al. (eds),Plutarch’s Moralia (London: Heinemann, 1931), p. 475.
Glenda McLeod, Virtue and Venom: Catalogs of Women from Antiquity to the Renaissance (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991), p. 1.
Froma I. Zeitlin, ‘Foreword’, in Nicole Loraux, Children of Athena: Athenian Ideas about Citizenship and the Division between the Sexes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), p. xii.
On Agrippina see Anthony A. Barrett, Agrippina: Mother of Nero (London: Batsford, 1995).
For Messalina see Sandra R. Joshel, ‘Female Desire and the Discourse of Empire: Tacitus’s Messalina’, in Barbara Laslett et al. (eds), History and Theory: Feminist Research, Debates and Contestations (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), pp. 383–415.
On the authority of Tacitus see, for instance, Burke, ‘Survey of the Popularity of Ancient Historians’, and Donald R. Kelley, ‘Tacitus Noster: The Germania in the Renaissance and Reformation’, in T. J. Luce and A. J. Woodman (eds), Tacitus and the Tacitean Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), pp. 152–67.
Ernest Breisach, Historiography: Ancient, Medieval and Modern (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), p. 64.
R.G. Collingwood, The Idea of History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), p. 37.
Titus Livius, The History of Rome (London: T. Cadell, 1822), Book 1, XIII, p. 25.
N. Davidson, ‘Theology, Nature and the Law: Sexual Sin and Sexual Crime in Italy from the Fourteenth to the Seventeenth Century’, in T. Dean and K. J. P. Lowe (eds), Crime, Society and the Law in Renaissance Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 83–4.
Patricia Klindienst Joplin, ‘Ritual Work on Human Flesh: Livy’s Lucretia and the Rape of the Body Politic’, Helios 17 (1990): 55.
Sandra R. Joshel, ‘The Body Female and the Body Politic: Livy’s Lucretia and Verginia’, in Amy Richlin (ed.), Pornography and Representation in Greece and Rome (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 115.
Froma I. Zeitlin, ‘Foreword’, in Nicole Loraux, The Children of Athena: Athenian Ideas about Citizenship and the Division of the Sexes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), p. xii.
Erica Mathieson, ‘Women in the Ecclesiastical History of Eusebius: A Comparison with Women in the New Testament’, MA thesis, Macquarie University (1996), p. 42.
Marina Warner, Alone of all her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1976), p. xxi.
Ronald Syme, perhaps the most highly regarded Tacitus specialist of the twentieth century, wrote of his portrayal of Agrippina that ‘Taci- tus’s portrayal is terrible and truthful. Julia Agrippina, the mother of Nero, is wholly authentic.’ Syme’s only reference to Tacitus’s authentic portrait of Julia Agrippina is, however, Tacitus. See Ronald Syme, Tacitus (London: Oxford University Press, 1958), pp. 334–5.
Howard D. Weinbrot, ‘Politics, Taste and National Identity: Some Uses of Tacitism in Eighteenth-Century Britain’, in T. J. Luce and A. J. Woodman (eds), Tacitus and the Tacitean Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), p. 178.
Francesca Santoro L’Hoir, ‘Tacitus and Women’s Usurption of Power’, Classical World, 88 (1994): 5.
Cited in Nicole Loraux, The Experiences of Tiresias: The Feminine and the Greek Man (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), p. 236.
Thomas E. J. Wiedmann, ‘Thucydides, Women and the Limits of Rational Analysis’, Greece&Rome, 30, 2 (1983): 162.
Thomas Harrison, ‘Herodotus and the Ancient Greek Idea of Rape’, in Susan Deacy and Karen F. Pierce (eds), Rape in Antiquity (London: Duckworth, 1997), p. 199.
Marnie Hughes-Warrington, Fifty Key Thinkers in History (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 156–64.
John Gould, Herodotus (London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1989), p. 129.
Carolyn Dewald, ‘Women and Culture in Herodotus’ Histories’, Women’s Studies (1975): 92.
John L. Myres, Herodotus: Father of History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1953) p. 16.
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© 2002 Mary Spongberg
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Spongberg, M. (2002). The Classical Inheritance. In: Writing Women’s History since the Renaissance. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-230-20307-5_2
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