Women and Glory

We have talked a few times about the way that women in the Renaissance were used as a means to solidify relationships between men. What we have not talked about is what relationships in the Renaissance men cemented for women. Before Coriolanus, I would have assumed that was because there was really no such phenomenon. However, here Volumina makes it clear that that was not in fact the case. For all of the ways that women were subject to men during the Renaissance, it seems that women such as Volumina could shape and mold the men around them to acquire the socially-recognized honor and valor they never will be able to. Such a relationship, although marginally analogous to the uses men had for women in the Renaissance, is of course nowhere near perfectly parallel. Even though some women seemed to have the power to push the men in their lives to great deeds for their own advancement, any women who did manage to claw her way into history would still forever be couched in the terms of the man who they helped to achieve great things. Volumina comments on this very tragedy and irony when she herself, pushing Coriolanus to bigger and better things, cannot speak of Hecuba without the mention of her great son Hector.