History of Women in the West: Volume III Renaissance and the Enlightenment Paradoxes

Becoming attuned to another way of looking at things, listening to other voices, is an enormously challenging and stimulating task. This volume prompts us in some ways to think the unthinkable, imagine the unimaginable... In good Enlightenment fashion, the editors have demonstrated that one interpretation need not preclude another. In so doing, they have laid the foundation for the next stage of women's history. -- Lindsay Wilson * American Historical Review * Seventeen superb essays concern women's everyday lives and the cultural structures that circumscribed their actions... The editors stress the ability of early modern European women to operate actively in a society that demeaned them, an essential corrective to writings that narrate only the effects of a misogynous culture on its victims. -- Richard M. Golden * Religious Studies Review * This volume, like its predecessors, will markedly increase and improve our knowledge of its field of study, laying the ground for much subsequent work. * Virginia Quarterly Review * The third volume of this excellent series explores women's position in the socioeconomic world of the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries... The essays are unique in that they use evidence and ideals that are particular to women. This volume is a first-rate piece of scholarship, holding wide appeal for just about anyone interested in this time period of history. * Library Journal *

Natalie Zemon Davis is Henry Charles Lea Professor of History, Emerita, Princeton University. Arlette Farge is Director of Research in Modern History, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Paris. Georges Duby, a member of the Academie Francaise, is Professor of Medieval History at the College de France. Michelle Perrot is Professor of Contemporary History at the Universite de Paris VII.