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In fourteenth-century Italy, Antonia, the daughter of Dante Alighieri, longs for a stable family and home while developing her artistic talent and seeking a place for herself in a world with limited options for women.

Thirteen-year-old Irene Benenati, a top soccer player on the girl's team at her Missouri school, plays on a fiercely competitive boy's soccer team during the year her family spends in Italy and experiences culture clashes both on and off the field.

When Laura della Scala's older sister drowns, Laura leaves the shelter of the convent where she has spent the last six years and enters Venetian society, while she searches for the truth about what happened to her sister.

Frustrated with the restrictions her gender imposes on her life, fourteen-year-old Donata, disguised as a boy, sneaks out of her noble family's house to roam the streets of late sixteenth-century Venice and then must confront the repercussions of her actions.

In fourteenth-century Bologna, Alessandra Giliani, a brilliant young girl, defies convention and risks death in order to attend medical school at the university so that she can study anatomy.

In Renaissance Italy, Artemisia Gentileschi endures the subjugation of women that allows her father to take credit for her extraordinary paintings, rape and the ensuing trial, and torture, buoyed by her deceased mother's stories of strong women of the Bible.

This alternative history of the Renaissance as told through the emerging literature of beauty focuses on the actresses, authors and courtesans who fought the era's misogyny and explains how their efforts are still relevant today.