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Jacob Burckhardt's view that Renaissance women "stood on a footing of perfect equality" with Renaissance men has been repeatedly cited by feminists both as a prelude to the marshaling of rich historical evidence of women's inequality and as a polemical signal of the theoretical importance of gender difference in our constructions of the Renaissance or of any other historical period.' In striking contrast to Burckhardt, cast in the role of the grandly erroneous patriarch, Joan Kelly was until recently cast as the good mother or muse in the field of Renaissance (or early modern) feminist studies.2 In her famous essay of 1977, "Did Women Have a Renaissance?" she challenged Burckhardt, and his cultural authority, with an argument for the Renaissance as a period of economlic and social decline for xvomen relative both to Renaissance men and to medieval women. Recently, however, as all the books under review suggest, a significant trend in feminist scholarship has entailed a rejection both of Kelly's dark vision of the Renaissance and of Burckhardt's rosy one. For reasons worth pondering, this trend seems most evident in books that focus on middling and upper-class women whose ability to write gave Feminist Studies 20, no. 2 (summer 1994).

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The ideological and political climate during the Greek Civil War had a negative effect on the staging of Shakespeare's plays in Greece. Between 1946 and 1950, the English dramatist came to be associated with conservatism and escapism. This impression was largely due to the way Shakespeare's plays were performed by the state-funded National Theater of Greece in Athens and to the new repertory policy of private theater companies that favored the production of contemporary Greek plays. This new policy, which was ideologically-inspired, was seen as a sign of cultural progress. The production of Shakespeare's plays during this period declined and so did the culture that supported it.