Sarah Dunant, is a best selling novelist of the Italian renaissance featuring the lives of women in the Italian renaissance.   In the last half-century, historians of art and culture have done a fantastic job of uncovering the untold stories of the lives of women:  painters, visionary nuns, art patrons, proxy rulers and high-class courtesans.  Thanks to recent feminist history their stories are now being brought to light, shining a different torch beam onto art and culture. We know more about then than we ever did before.  

In this lecture we will explore their lives and the choices facing women and the ways they made it work, from becoming rich successful sex workers to the inner life of convents where huge numbers of women were enclosed.

As a novelist, as well as a historian, our lecturer’s job has been to bring these discoveries to a wider public through fiction and lecturing.

About the Lecturer

Sarah Dunant is a Novelist, broadcaster and critic. Sarah read history at Cambridge, then worked for many years as a cultural journalist in radio and television on such programmes as Kaleidoscope (BBC Radio 4), The Late Show (BBC 2), and Night Waves/Free thinking (BBC Radio 3). She has published thirteen novels, taught renaissance studies at Washington University, St Louis and lectured around the world at festivals and conferences. Her last five novels have been set within the Italian Renaissance. In the Name of the Family completes the story of the Borgia family and the remarkable period of Italian history in which they lived. She is a regular contributor to BBC Radio 4’s A Point of View and these talks, alongside her series on history for Radio 4, When Greeks Flew Kites, are available on podcast or BBC sounds.