We will begin where all early modern feminists, from Christine de Pizan to Hélisenne de Crenne and beyond, begin: in the beginning was the word, and the word was misogynist. This is the ideological, literary, and cultural context for reading and appreciating virtually every early modern feminist work.

The strange case of French Calvinist women writers poses one of the more puzzling questions that scholars face in their efforts to reanimate the lost or silenced voices of early modern women. The pool of possibilities for the examination of these Huguenot writers is paltry, due to many factors, all of which obstruct a clear hearing of their voices. Admittedly, since women writers are relatively rare in sixteenth-century Calvinism, there is an inevitable temptation to stretch meager evidence too far.

Le Miroir de l'âme pécheresse, a volume of devotional verse named for its principal poem, was published in Alençon in 1531 and in Paris two years later. The Paris edition identifies its author as “Marguerite de France, Soeur Vnicque du Roy,” and later as “Royne de Navarre.” Some eleven years later, the daughter of Henry VIII translated the Miroir as a gift for her latest stepmother, Queen Katherine Parr. The poem has thus a doubly unusual status. In an age when literature was overwhelmingly male in its origins, the agencies of genesis and transmission for this work were female. And in an age when most writers came from the middle class, the agents of its production and reproduction were of high birth, members of royal families.

The Stowe inventory of the contents of the Wardrobe of Robes gives us a privileged glimpse into the closets of Queen Elizabeth in 1600. There could be found over one thousand clothing items: gowns, robes, kirtles, foreparts, petticoats, cloaks, safeguards, and doublets, plus two hundred additional pieces of material, as well as pantofles, fans, and jewelry. Many of these were gifts presented to the queen at the New Year, on progresses, at Accession Day tilts or other events. Items of embroidered clothing come to dominate the existing gift rolls. The 1588-89 New Year's gifts include, in addition to £795 in gold, almost six dozen gifts of clothing, most of them richly embroidered, plus sixteen items of jewelry, several pieces of gold- or silverplate, and a dozen gifts of embroidered furnishings.

In 1578 Hubert Languet wrote to his young protegee Philip Sidney concerning the latter's plan to assist the Low Countries in their fight against Spain. Surprisingly, the old republican Calvinist monarchomach vetoed the idea, bluntly informing the impulsive teenager that “you and your fellows, I mean men of noble birth, consider that nothing brings you more honour than wholesale slaughter, and you are generally guilty of the greatest injustice.” This hostile assessment of the aristocratic warrior ethos — what Languet derides as “mere love of fame and honour and … displaying your courage” — bears witness to a major ideological upheaval of the early modern period: the attack on the aristocratic politics of violence and, to quote another Elizabethan, “glory got by courage of manhood.”

The last fifteen to twenty years have witnessed a phenomenal growth in the study of medieval and Renaissance confraternities, those lay religious associations that pervaded the spiritual and social fabric of pre-modern European society. In English-language scholarship, the field was first surveyed by three historians who firmly left their mark on this fertile soil: Brian Pullan examined the place of the Venetian scuole (as local confraternities were called) in the social fabric of the state; Rab Hatfield investigated the social and political influence of the Florentine confraternity of the Magi; and Richard Trexler probed the place of confraternities for youths in Florentine civic ritual.