This slim volume, based on a lecture series in Rome at the Fondazione Marco Besso in 2011–12, brings together essays on women in and around Renaissance Rome. Topics are diverse, but can be divided roughly into three groups representing varying approaches to early modern women’s history. A pair of archivally based essays demonstrate women’s active participation in the city’s economic life. Elena di Maggio mines Marco Antonio Altieri’s unpublished 1525 account of the Roman confraternity of the Savior for information about the confraternity’s numerous female patrons, while Ivana Ait uncovers numerous women active in business, particularly moneylending, investing, and working in hotels and inns that served the growing pilgrimage trade.

A second group of essays studies women as subjects in painting or literature. Paolo Procaccioli continues his studies on Pietro Aretino with an enjoyable take on the humanist’s lambasting of Rome through the words of two courtesans, characters in a satirical work of 1534, written after Aretino had to flee Rome for publishing pornography. The courtesans’ discourse portrays Rome as the Whore of Babylon, as they both represent and discuss the city’s reputation as coda mundi. Anna Cavallaro explores a late fifteenth-century fresco cycle at the Orsini family castle in Bracciano representing Orsini ladies at play, hunting, dancing, and making music. Cavallaro examines in detail the frescoes’ dating, techniques, and unresolved questions of authorship, linking the work’s curiously anachronistic subject and style, which echoes late Gothic representations of courtly life, to themes treated in noble residences of Northern Italy. The focus here is on the Roman baronial nobility’s well-known slowness to adopt the humanistic trends prevalent at other Central and Northern Italian princely courts by the middle of the fifteenth century, rather than on women per se.

A third topic might be called instruction. Anna Esposito opens the volume with an examination of city statutes and case law in Rome and Lazio to conclude that women’s reputations were defined as largely sexual in legal settings. Francesca Niutta turns to the world of early print, identifying works printed explicitly for women in the fifteenth century and noting they primarily treat religious themes. Finally, in the concluding essay, Esposito asks in what areas women could realize their wishes and direct their lives, adding an innovative exploration of women’s sentiments as revealed in letters to their husbands.

Many questions remain implicit: how did the women’s experience in Rome differ from other, more extensively studied Italian cities like Florence or Venice? How were Roman women involved with the intense religiosity of this era? Did proximity to the wifeless papal court and cardinalate households affect women significantly? Given these silences, one feels the lack of a substantial introduction or conclusion that would pull the parts together into a whole. Nonetheless, these solidly researched studies offer useful tesserae in the mosaic of women’s experience in Rome.