By Any Other Name

The England of Emilia Bassano’s time was ruled by a powerful woman, but law and custom offered few rights and protections for most women in society. In general, women in the Elizabethan era were expected to be subservient to men. They could not inherit titles (with the exception being the crown) and were raised to become homemakers and mothers. Both medical science and religion of the time enforced these ideas. Medical knowledge, stemming from the Greeks, “held that female humans were essentially incomplete or unfinished males” and thus, as the weaker sex were “more prone to psychological and physical ailment and in need of supervision, control and at times restraint by the one true sex, men” (Garcia, Lucas. “Gender on Shakespeare’s Stage: A Brief History.” Writers Theatre, 21 Nov. 2018). Religion was also used to justify male control. Though there are “conflicting messages about sex and gender in the Bible, it was deployed by Early Modern English society to enforce the idea that women were in need of domination and stewardship by men” (Garcia). In her poetry defending Eve, Emilia Bassano points out that this misogynistic understanding of the Bible is not necessarily supported by the text, but these ideas were still widespread.