Jill Burke > Quotes

“In one popular sixteenth-century text, a physician asks bluntly, ‘Why are women more imprudent and foolish than men?’: Because women have much narrower and smaller pores than men, so they cannot evacuate vapours from their head. Moreover, women have wet and warm complexions. So that if they generate in their head very gross vapours and… swirling noxious gases that they cannot purge out of their head through their pores, there cannot be women who are prudent and wise, or only very rarely.8”
― Jill Burke, How to Be a Renaissance Woman: The Untold History of Beauty & Female Creativity

“Let these neglected voices be heard Let our women not be so quiet That they fail to be heard above the voices of men.”
― Jill Burke, How to Be a Renaissance Woman: The Untold History of Beauty & Female Creativity