This work is of importance to anyone with an interest in whether women, especially Jewish Ashkenazic women, had a Renaissance. Many Pious Women is an annotated translation with extensive introductory essays of a unique 16th-century manuscript from Italy in Western Yiddish. 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. Women everywhere, students of gender studies, Yiddishists and linguists will welcome this work now available for the first time in the original Yiddish text with an English translation.
