The Role of Women in Renaissance Society When considering women's place in society, it is common to see their struggle for equality as a long, gradual rise culminating in their liberation in the twentieth century. Michael Kaufman in an article entitled "Spare Ribs: The Conception of Woman in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance" (Soundings Summer, 1973) states that the place of women actually diminished with the advent of the Renaissance: the forces that gave originating in The Renaissance radically transformed most aspects of English economic and social life. The change from agricultural community to urban market helped accelerate and extend the subjugation of women (150). The conception of women in medieval literature is divided between the clergy's portrayal of her as a seductive sinner or the aristocratic tradition of courtly love in which she serves. transform earthly love into spiritual sublimity. According to Kaufman, this medieval view represents only a very small (3%) male aristocratic population; his actual situation was better than the literature indicated. But that gap narrowed during the Renaissance, and when "the medieval agricultural economy...succumbed to Tudor mercantile capitalism,...woman became an economic cipher and a social possession" (141). It seems that only the wily and headstrong Queen Elizabeth could provide a female presence strong enough to counteract some aspects of a male-dominated Renaissance culture. The Elizabethan sonnet provides a paradoxical example of the inferior status of women. Although it has all the idealized virtues: "gentleness, constancy, beauty, and, of course, chastity" (155), the sonnet itself functions as a measure of "male vitality" (156). It is the male who eme...... middle of paper ......I would be fascinated to know more about the relationship between unrequited love and artistic creativity; I doubt that a simple cause and effect relationship exists. To what extent does modern romantic love follow the tradition of Petrarch? Or does our age of instant gratification, sexual equality, premature cynicism and irony make it largely irrelevant? Is it possible to spiritualize romantic love? What happens to spiritual health when a relationship ends? Given Petrarch's importance in history and the current debate on the status of women, these questions are crucial to understanding our society. Works CitedWest, Morris. Petrarch and his world. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1963.Kaufman, Michael. "Chops: the conception of women in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance". Surveys 56.2 (1974): 139-163.