In striking contrast to Burckhardt, Joan Kelly in her famous 1977 essay, “Did Women Have a Renaissance?” argued that the Renaissance was a period of economic and social decline for women relative both to Renaissance men and to medieval women. Jacob Burckhardt’s view that Renaissance European women “stood on a footing of perfect equality” with Renaissance men has been repeatedly cited by feminist scholars as a prelude to their presentation of rich historical evidence of women’s inequality.
