She-Devils, Harlots and Harridans in Northern Renaissance Prints
The social, sexual and demonic power of women was an important theme in the popular print of Germany and the Low Countries in the 16th century, as Julia Nurse shows.
They beat men, stole their money, killed them even, and they could fly – a veritable feat for any ordinary woman. The Renaissance woman was, indeed, a she-devil or so we are led to believe from prints by German and Netherlandish artists of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries currently on show at the British Museum, in an exhibition The ‘Power of Women’ and the Northern Renaissance Print.
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