There were essentially two estates of women in 15th century Italy, at least among the nobility; as a bride of God or a bride of Man. Any reasonable sized city may have 50+ convents and 1000's of nuns, some of them placed in nunneries from 7 years of age, many as family affairs with aunts, sisters, cousins and nieces all from the same noble families; mostly to do with the social consequences of the dowry system than vocation (nuns with a vocation occasionaly dressed up as men and took themselves of to monasteries where they could practive their vocation more seriously as 'men' - we know this from records of ecclesiastical trials in reference to woman who were caught, we may imagine for each caught there were several that were not). All, nonetheless, under the auspices of the Catholic church.Atlantean wrote:... nobody has yet been able to explain to me the presence of a Popesse and an Empress in the sequence of trumps.
Usually feminine figures however were used allegorically in the portrayal of abstractions such as your examples of virtues # or of church and state for another example...