Book Review: How To Be A Renaissance Woman

“It’s not surprising that there was no one way of being a woman in the Renaissance”

Now and then I do like a bit of non-fiction. I was intrigued when I came across this in a Waterstones somewhere in Yorkshire. It is a book that celebrates feminine beauty and creativity in a time when it was severely stunted, and society's expectations were incredibly black and white. You didn’t have much luck in being born a woman, even if you were born into the wealthiest of families. Okay, sure it may have saved you somewhat from being accused and then tortured and inevitably burned as a witch. But still, life pretty much sucked if you were a woman in the Renaissance.

 However, and this is a big one, there seem to be little glimmers of joy – at least if you were considered beautiful. Aside from trying to birth as many children as possible, women were coming up with new ways of becoming beautiful. According to Jill Burke, sometimes it involved cheating. A little like today you go to the tanning salon or to a cosmetic surgeon if you’re not happy with your lips or boobs. Believe it or not, women made fake boobs and they were weirdly delightful. But then it became the vogue for small boobs so that fad didn’t last long. But it seems like a lot of these fads did stay, like our aversion to body hair – we can thank the Renaissance for that.

Now we always seem to criticise the patriarchy for ‘the male gaze’ and that it's bad for women. Turns out the ‘women's gaze’ could be particularly damming. Women were sometimes punished for ‘bewitching men with a look’. Hindsight is a funny thing because now that would be utterly ridiculous but back then in the 1400-1500s? A beautiful woman was idealised but also weaponised to provoke a man's jealousy. Perhaps it just proves men are weak to our charms? Or perhaps they were just idiots and assumed too much. It seems like a time when women held little power, inciting such reactions in men seems to subvert the power and return it to women. And that is pretty powerful to me.

Whilst we think about power, women's cosmetics had a lot of poisonous crap in them – lead and arsenic to name but a few. It is the modern understanding that women didn’t know, but it seems they did know and didn’t care. The pursuit of beauty was strong! Or a damn good way to ‘accidentally’ kill your abusive husband. ‘I brought this cream for blemishes; I didn't know it would kill my husband!’. To be honest it’s no surprise a lot of women were killed for witchcraft. Especially when they ran the businesses that sold cosmetics…

I think one of my favourite things about this book was probably the recipes (men have no fear – no arsenic here!) so you can really transform yourself into a Renaissance woman in the 21st century if you so wish. They seem utterly delightful as was the whole book. During a period where we hear more about the achievements of men like Da Vinci and Galileo, it’s a nice change for women to have the spotlight.