Author’s Introduction
I have been a historian - of society, art, culture - for the best part of twenty years, mostly working on women in the Italian Renaissance. I like being able to retrieve the lives of those whose stories and achievements have often been lost, in a way that those of men have not. I’ve discovered endurance and success where one might not expect it, seen how women as individuals negotiate a world where the odds are stacked against them and figured out to bend and break the rules.
Research is a tremendous pleasure. I love the library, compiling bibliographies, and working my way through them, the way that a reference in a footnote to an obscure article can open up a whole new line of enquiry. Artifacts, paintings, buildings, sculpture, work in the same way; everything contains a narrative, waiting to be told. But for me, there is no greater thrill than what I call the archive high. There’s the anticipation that runs through you when faced with a pile of documents, especially when they’re coated with dust and you know that you’re the first person to look at them in a long, long time, and you wonder what they’re going to reveal. Quite often you go through page after page of material that you’re sure is fascinating, just not to you, and then suddenly, something jumps out. It might only be a line on a page, but it can prove a hunch, it can answer and pose a whole set of questions, it can set alight the world in which you’ve become immersed. And once you’ve had the rush that kind of discovery brings you’ll never have enough, you’ll want it again and again.
I can’t make notes on a computer, by the time I’m ready to start to write I’ll have a little army of ruled exercise books, filled with my fairly horrible handwriting. And then, for me, the challenge really begins, to make a narrative out of these disparate bits and pieces, stitching and weaving together a story. It’s a story that’s sort of mine, but really belongs to the women who had the courage and determination to “prevail beyond the condition of their sex” in ways that from the luxury of western living in the 21st century I can only begin to imagine.