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Miniature of Catherine de Medici attributed to Clouet, housed at the Victoria and Albert Museum. Courtesy of Lara E. Eakins.

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Of Interest~

Renaissance Women of the Past

The following links relate to women of various times and places who are most known for their Renaissance qualities.  Of course, they have their shortcomings too. For instance, Catherine de Medici seems to have been largely responsible for the questionable fashion of corsets and may also have had a fairly ruthless streak when it came to her enemies.  Of course, this latter supposed fact has been contested by writers such as Honore de Balzac, so Catherine may have had an undeserved reputation. (Historians are not without biases, any more than the rest of us are).  But however mistaken her historians might have been, one gleans even through them that she was a very accomplished and learned woman, and a talented negotiator. 

Jane Austen was born in 1775 near Basingstoke, England. The seventh of eight children, Austen was an avid reader whose keen writing skills evidenced themselves as early as the age of thirteen. It might take weeks to fully explore all the links on our Jane Austen page, but they would be weeks well and happily spent.

Maria Gaetana Agnesi was born in 1718 in what is now Milan, Italy. A child prodigy, Agnesi is most remembered for solving an algebraic equation for a particular curve. Originally named for the shape it describes but later suffering a series of mistranslations, the curve has become known as The Witch of Agnesi.

Hypatia of Alexandria was a mathematician, astronomer and philosopher who died about 415 C.E.  The Byzantine church historian, Socrates Scholasticus, wrote in his Ecclesiastical History (finished sometime between 439 and 450) that Hypatia "made such attainments in literature and science as to far surpass all the philosophers of her own time."

This early artist's rendering of Hypatia courtesy of Khan Amore, www.Hypatia.org