Italianate Englishwomen: Margaret Roper, Anne Bacon, and Mary Sidney
Publication Date
July 31, 2026
Creator
Myhand, Victoria
Abstract
The classical revival of the Italian Renaissance did not just reshape art and politics; it quietly revolutionised the lives of some elite English women, enabling them to participate in the intellectual, political, and religious discourses of their time. This thesis focuses on the spread and adoption of ideas which originated in Renaissance Italy, particularly in Florence, in sixteenth-century England, and how the impact of these ideas on English society affected the lives of women. It first establishes the presence of Italians and dissemination of their ideas in England, and then more closely investigates how the expression of ideas about women in English texts followed the classical model spearheaded in Italy. Finally, it reexamines the lives and surviving writings of three elite English women, demonstrating that women were beneficiaries and participants in the recovery of a classical literary inheritance in England via the Italian Renaissance, despite primarily being consigned to private life by their patriarchal society.
Two of the most important ideas of Florentine origins that affected society in sixteenth-century England were humanism and the classical education paradigm that developed from it. This thesis argues that classical education, as part of an intellectual inheritance from Italy, allowed some elite English women to participate in politics and religious reform. Margaret Roper, Anne Bacon, and Mary Sidney are often noted as some of the most educated sixteenth-century English women, but what has been unexplored, until now, is the fact that their education, and in turn the works and lives that they created by using their education, was shaped by the adoption of Italian cultural practices in England. By contextualising these women into broader patterns of transnational intellectual and cultural diffusion, their role as powerful and important English historical figures can be understood more thoroughly.
Item Type
ethesis
Thesis Type
PhD
Subjects (LC)
Associated Schools / Departments
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Myhand_Victoria_20279932_Final Submission of PhD Thesis.pdf
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