The Classical Inheritance

The cultural dominance of classical literature during the Renaissance established an exclusively masculinist cast to the study of history. Knowledge of a small corpus of classical texts created a cultural hegemony that regulated elite education and determined entrance into the law, the church and the civil service for 500 years. The ‘classical’ education saw women largely excluded from intellectual life, based as it was on an ideal of public life drawn from ancient Athens and Rome. This classical ideal was ideologically underpinned by a gendered notion of separate spheres. Not only were women denied the possibility of a classical education, but that very education reinforced the belief that the exclusion of women who from the public sphere was ‘morally correct’ and ‘in accordance with the whole tradition of western civilisation’.1 From the Renaissance onwards male scholars held a particular scorn for women who usurped the masculine privilege of a classical education and used the historical representation of women in classical texts to argue against the education of women and their entrance into the public sphere.