Katherine A. McIver is Associate Professor of Art History at The University of Alabama at Birmingham, USA. She is also the editor of Art and Music in the Early Modern Period: Essays in Honor of Franca Trinchieri Camiz (Ashgate, 2003).

• Contents: Introduction; The women: the cast of characters; The Renaissance palazzo as a public voice for women; The Renaissance palazzo interior as a private voice for women; Domestic consumption: listening to women's private voice; Women, the church, and religious foundations; Glossary; Appendices; Bibliography; Index.

Prize: Co-winner of the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women Book Award for a work published in 2006 '... a fine and welcome study ... provides a new model for understanding what women bought, displayed, collected, and commissioned. Carefully integrating extensive archival research with a set of important critical inquiries, McIver offers up a well-balanced picture of domestic space, subject and object in and against what might be called the unbalanced field of Italian Renaissance art history.' Allison Levy, Wheaton College, USA ’Through the use of newly discovered archival evidence, Katherine McIver offers an innovative and illuminating analysis of female patronage in Northern Italy during the sixteenth century... she present revealing new insights about how early modern women exercised political agency and economic power within a patriarchal society... The detailed appendix of documents will be of note both for those with a particular interest in material culture of the Early Modern period as well as a wider audience... this is a valuable study with a strong methodological framework combining the close reading of original documents with well-balanced critical analysis of a variety of visual material.’ The Art Book ’The book cleverly fills in some of the lack of sources in English and aptly testifies to the depth and liveliness of the cultural debate about women in Renaissance Italy between the 14th and 17th centuries... The superb peculiarity of McIver's work consists in giving a new historical perspective on women's power, displayed in different manners and strategies in order to maintain and increase family properties, or even to advance their social status.’ Women's History Magazine ’The publisher, Ashgate, is to be thanked and congratulated for allowing the author to include almost fifty pages of transcribed inventories and a glossary... This ensures that the book will become an invaluable resource for work on women as patrons and consume