Twenty-one chronologically ordered essays explore women's roles in the cultural production of their time from the Middle Ages to the present. A part of the essays examines the work of the earliest women writers and artists - memoirs and meditations, novellas and plays - and the representation or self-representation of women in texts, including medieval folksong, hagiography and painting of the Baroque era. Other essays focuse on women's participation in politics and culture from the eighteenth century onwards: as translators, essayists, consumers of visual ephemera, writers, artists, film directors and performers.