This work is of importance to anyone with an interest in whether women especially Jewish
Ashkenazic women had a Renaissance. It details the participation in the Querelle des Femmes
and Power of Women topos as expressed in this hagiographic work on the lives of biblical women
including the apocryphal Judith. The Power of Women topos is discussed in the context of the
reception of the Amazon myth in Jewish literature and the domestication of powerful female
figures. In the Querelle our author pleads with husbands for generosity and respect for their
wives' piety. Whether women living in the Renaissance experienced a renaissance is a debate
raging since Joan Kelly raised the possibility that this historic phenomenon essentially did
not affect women. The question is raised with reference to the women depicted in Many Pious
Women. These topics find their expression in a richly annotated translation with extensive
introductory essays of a unique 16th-century manuscript in WesternYiddish (Judeo-German)
written in Italy. The text will also be useful to scholars of the history of Yiddish and
theorists of its development. Women everywhere gender and Renaissance scholars Yiddishists
and linguists will all welcome this work now available for the very first time in the original
text with an English translation.
