求大N帮助，这文章实在是理解不了

Jacob Burckhardt’sview that Renaissance European women “stood on a footing of perfect equality”with Renaissance men has been repeatedly cited by feminist scholars as aprelude to their presentation of rich historical evidence of women’sinequality. In striking contrast to Burckhardt, Joan Kelly in her famous 1977essay, “Did Women Have a Renaissance?” argued that the Renaissance was a periodof economic and social decline for women relative both to Renaissance men andto medieval women. Recently, however, a significant trend among feministscholars has entailed a rejection of both Kelly’s dark vision of theRenaissance and Burckhardt’s rosy one. Many recent works by these scholars stress the ways in which differences among Renaissance women—especially interms of social status and religion—work to complicate the kinds ofgeneralizationsboth Burckhardt and Kelly made on the basis of theirobservations about upper-class Italian women

The trend is alsoevident, however, in works focusing on those middle- and upper-class Europeanwomen whose ability to write gives them disproportionate representation in thehistorical record. Such women were, simply by virtue of their literacy, membersof a tiny minority of the population, so it is risky to take their descriptionsof their experiences as typical of “female experience” in any general sense.Tina Krontiris, for example, in her fascinating study of six Renaissance womenwriters, does tend at times to conflate “women” and “women writers,assumingthat women’s gender, irrespective of other social differences, includingliteracy, allows us to view women as a homogeneous social group and make thatgroup an object of analysis. Nonetheless, Krontiris makes a significant contributionto the field and is representative of those authors who offer what might becalled a cautiously optimistic assessment of Renaissance women’s achievements,although she also stresses the social obstacles Renaissance women faced whenthey sought to raise their “oppositional voices.” Krontiris is concerned toshow women intentionally negotiating some power for themselves (at least in therealm of public discourse) against potentially constraining ideologies, but inher sober and thoughtful concluding remarks, she suggests that such verbalopposition to cultural stereotypes was highly circumscribed; women seldomattacked the basic assumptions in the ideologies that oppressed them

跪谢跪谢，毕竟看完这么一大堆实在不容易。。。