[In the following essay, Nash shows how in her letters de Crenne uses anger to offer a feminist critique and to revise and rewrite literary, cultural, and intellectual history.]

The claim has often been made that women in early modern literature, both those writing it and those being written about or depicted in it, have very seldom explored the subject of “women by women,” a seemingly modern subject of inquiry and revisionary writing so central to the feminist movement as we know it today.¹ I wish to offer here discussion of a clearly notable exception in the Renaissance, the case of Hélisenne de Crenne as female author and central female character as both acquire meaning in her Epistres familieres et invectives of 1539.² In this early, highly neglected monument of feminine anger and feminist (re)writing, Hélisenne already espouses what are unmistakably today the major principles and strategies of the feminist movement, those of “reading like a woman” as Jane Marcus has recently called them or of “the resisting reader” as Judith Fetterly also puts it in the very titles of their two seminal studies.³ Hélisenne's Epistres—much more than her other better known and today more widely read Angoisses douloureuses, which she called one of her “petites compositions” (EI4/sig. 06^v)—are remarkable for the way their author and central character harness the resistant yet creative energies of anger in art. This is not done just passively for lamentation, as do so many feminist writings in the early modern period (including the Angoisses) and even beyond, but, to the contrary, actively for the purposes of “feminist critique,” for the feminist causes of revision and rewriting of literary, cultural, and intellectual history itself. This revision involves counter-reading and debunking the conventional, centuries-handed-down wisdom and authority of an oppressive patriarchal ideology. Her rewriting is the participation by a woman in the unmaking and remaking of patriarchally written history. She supplements, and at times replaces, the founding fathers and subsequent male exemplars and enforcers of this ideology in literature, culture, and civilization with accomplished, powerful female role models. Both of these strategies of revision and rewriting come together in Hélisenne's intriguing and defiant understanding and portrayal of “performing manly works”: “exerçant œuvres viriles” (EF8/sig. K2^v). Through this central and unifying concern of the Epistres, Hélisenne posits, much ahead of her time, nothing less than the feminist transference of “manly works” to the feminine domain, their redefinition and their rewriting, au féminin, in the service of art and social-intellectual progress.

Hélisenne's letters are combative and revisionary and poignant autobiographical constructs of feminine anger and its recourse to feminist writing. They reflect the transgressive, subversive, indeed deconstructive nature and role of all true feminist writing. But there is also in these letters a determined feminine reconstructive impulse, and the latter is in particular what makes her the more powerful and effective as a writer, as the Renaissance writer of a cause—except of course to her husband and the other male antagonists in her letters, all those members of what she calls “ce deceptif & frauduleux sexe viril” (EF5/sig. 13^r) whom she addresses collectively at the end of her letters: “O mauldict & plus que mauldict, meschant & audacieux. O faulx dissimulateur, o meschant trahistre, qui ne sçauroit nyer qu'en toy n'habitent toutes deceptions, frauldes & collusions” (EI5/sig. P2^r-v). One might say that Hélisenne deconstructs in order to reconstruct. What she unmakes are fundamental and quite dangerous to the parties mentioned above: their blind depreciation of women in general and their “collusions” in thwarting woman's intellectual and creative potential, in short, the many abusive and unbearable instances of male domination and female exclusion in various realms of cultural-intellectual progress and public acts. Hélisenne's subversive letters, therefore, always aim for sexual equality, for cultural and intellectual parity. Let us look first at the feminine consciousness underlying these Epistres, at Hélisenne the character's anger and deeply felt awareness of the need of revision, the need of change. We can then better understand and appreciate the art of feminist (re)writing by Hélisenne the author which turns these letters into what they are—deeply reasoned, well controlled, cogently argued literary embodiments of that felt need for revision and change.

The female character-author in these letters is not only hurt, she is angry, and more angry than hurt. This outrage or anger is what truly compels her to write in the first place, as she informs the reader in the preface to her invectives. Her anger finds an outlet in her conscious act of reading, that is, in the resistant act of her reading like a woman. For Hélisenne, écrire au féminin begins with lire au féminin, and they both ultimately mean relire/récrire au féminin. For a woman like Hélisenne involved in feminist critique, to read and to write in a patriarchal culture mean rereading and rewriting this culture. She is forever, in response to exclusively male points of view, rereading situations in which she appropriates for woman in a given narrative those qualities and characteristics and values traditionally reserved by man for man: those inherited ones identified as rational, self-controlled, courageous, active, creative, and so forth. In the act of analyzing her anger and writing it down, she thus turns it into the narrative art of reversibility. She either portrays the “manly” traits and virtues listed above in women or she takes them away from men and gives the latter what they had always identified as feminine traits: those of being irrational, emotional, uncreative, and so forth. Anger is the first impulse of Hélisenne's art; corrective rereading and rewriting are its end results. The Epistres are full of the need for this reversal, of the patriarchal biases blocking women from reaching their creative potential. They offer a wide-ranging critique of woman's intellectual and cultural identification as merely the negative object to man, who is depicted as exploiting sexual difference in order literally to keep woman in her place and thus to insure the continuation of the patriarchal principle. This place, for Hélisenne's prime antagonist in her letters—her husband—is of course the household with its dreaded fate of endless spinning:

Pour certain toutes telles tiennes presumptions me provocqueroient à rire, n'estoit qu'en te travaillant pour t'exalter, tu t'esforces de totalement deprimer les autres. Et par especial tu increpes & reprens la muliebre condition. […] Parquoy tu conclus qu'autre ocupation [les femmes] ne doivent avoir que le filer.

(EI4/sig. 04^v)

Indeed, for Hélisenne's husband, women who attempt to break free of this domestic entrapment are all fraudulent: “O que miserables creatures sont toy, & toutes celles qui te ressemblent, dont grande multitude se retrouve. […] O frauduleuse condition” (EI2/sig. N5^r). This is why he had previously told her that she was utterly wasting her time in her desired intellectual pursuit of literature and writing: “[…] ton audacieuse hardiesse […] Pour certain il n'estoit necessaire affatiguer ta main, pour de ta vie passée me faire recors” (EI2/sig. N1^v).⁴ Not simply content to denounce Hélisenne's literary and intellectual pursuits, the husband had seen fit to deprecate all women for such pursuits, as the female character reminds him in the remainder of her speech in the “Fourth Invective Letter”:

Et parlant en general, tu dis que femmes sont de rudes et obnubilez espritz. […]

Ce m'est une chose admirable de ta promptitude, en ceste determination. J'ay certaine evidence par cela que si en ta faculté estoit, tu prohiberois le benefice litteraire au sexe feminin, l'improperant de n'estre capable des bonnes lettres. Si tu avois esté bien studieux en diversitez de livres, autre seroit ton opinion. Au moins si ton inveterée malice ne te stimuloit de persister en l'inimitié que tu portes aux dames. …

(sig. 04^v)

But of course Hélisenne realizes that her husband's patriarchal presumptuousness is part of a conspiracy against all womankind which has been cultivated and handed down from generation to generation, beginning with Ulysses and Anthenor:

Parquoy ne puis conjecturer quelz ont esté tes instructeurs en enfance. Mais rememorant la subtilité d'Ulixes & la trahison d'Anthenor, il est facile à presumer qu'en leur escholle nourriture tu as prins. Car certainement tu es d'eux vray imitateur & exemplaire.

(EI5/sig. P2^v)

Hélisenne's ultimate hope (and of course what she constantly works toward) is that this male perspective and conspiracy to promote women's intellectual and cultural darkness (“obnubilez espritz”) will undergo the same fate which befell Dathan and Abiram in Numbers 16:12-30: “Et avec ce desir mettray fin à mon epistre. Et ne voulant tes compagnons oublier, les adverty que je vouldroys que ce qui intervint à Dathan & Abiron leur puisse avenir” (EI5/sig. P3^v).

To the above fateful end of burying them once and for all, Hélisenne relentlessly continues her literary pursuits. She debunks the male thesis on women proffered by her husband and his male colleagues. She will counter that women possess the same kinds of strengths and abilities, intellectual and creative, as men. She will narrate example after example of women who perform as men do—women “exerçant œuvres viriles”—when they are not silenced and marginalized by men to household activities, not reduced to needle and thread. That is, Hélisenne rereads and especially rewrites in order to erase sexual difference, to undermine the patriarchal principle of female exclusion, all of which she accomplishes by reversing male and female performative role acts themselves. As the classic Renaissance female resisting reader-writer, Hélisenne deliberately erases the lines between male and female in order to negate sexual difference and discrimination. She reverses gender roles and overturns acts and accomplishments and qualities normally reserved for heroes by substituting in her portrayals of past and present public culture heroines for these heroes. Sometimes Hélisenne's heroines go unnamed, for she is encouraging women collectively to acquire and demonstrate the kind of creative courage and reason and stamina, the strength of character and will and purpose heretofore assigned and portrayed in men. Thus, she admonishes a friend who had been battered and slandered in love to apply the most manly of virtues—the Stoic sage's rigorous exercise of reason and will:

Et pour ce efforce toy contre la violence d'amour. […] Nostre ame n'est autre qu'une seule disposition, de laquelle nous faisons comme d'une image de cire, que nous pouvons selon nostre arbitrable volonté augmenter ou diminuer. Et avec telle facilité que l'ame se contriste, avec celle mesme se peult resjouir. Nostre vivre n'est autre chose qu'un vouloir, & où il t'inclinera, l'ame condescendra. Esvertue toy doncq' […] à la droicte voye de raison.

(EF5/sig. 13^r-v)

Thus, in another letter (EF9), she praises in these terms another friend who was determined to decide her own marital fate, rather than leaving it exclusively in the hands of her father:

Et à ceste occasion, entre autres propos par luy proferez, j'entens qu'il a dit que ta condition ne te preste tant de puissance, que sans son consentement il te solicite de vouloir aucune chose. […] A quoy tu dis avoir respondu que ne veulx nyer estre à luy subjette. Mais que nonobstant cela, tu peulx disposer totalement de ce que tu cognois à ton salut estre utile.

(sig. K4^r)

Thus, she reminds her readers in the preamble to her invectives how difficult it is for her to remain vigilant and strong in the face of adversity and misfortune:

Je me persuade de croire (o lecteurs debonnaires) qu'assez cognoissez estre difficile que la force d'une patience (combien qu'elle soit magnanime) soit si constante que par trop excessifz travaulx ne se trouve vaincuë.

(sig. M2^v)

Most of Hélisenne's heroines are of course named. They are striking examples of accomplished female figures from literature and cultural history which she uses to refute her husband's arrogant, maligning patriarchal perspective: “[…] je doubte la superabondance de tes injures, puis que tant de veritables histoires alencontre de ton inveterée malice faveur me prestent” (E13/sig. 03^r). These heroines include for Hélisenne one above all others so famous and so deserving of admiration and emulation that she spends a great deal of time describing her character and accomplishments. This woman's name is Dido, “qui en langage phenicien est interpreté, & vault autant à dire, comme Virago, exerçant œuvres viriles” (EF8/sig. K2^v). As we have seen in all of Hélisenne's heroines up to now, the performance of virile or manly works as a defining concept of feminine identity is a state of mind and will, the inner exercise of reason and strength of will, as well as the outward accomplishment of acts themselves. Dido (“Virago,” Latin for “heroine”) happens to embody in her character and actions this complete identity-concept. She is exemplary of “ceste personne [qui] est digne de louange, qui contre les infortunes constante se demonstre”; she is certainly not “du nombre d'aucunes pusillanimes femmes”; to the contrary, Dido is so strong and firm in the face of adversity and misfortune that her “magnanime constance” deserves to be imitated by all women, for “c'estoit celle que l'adverse fortune ne pouvoit aucunement surmonter.” Dido's real accomplishment included not only inner strength in responding to and controlling misfortune, but a determined, creative ability to turn misfortune into a positive outcome, quite literally into the construction of the city of Carthage. Here is part of Hélisenne's passage on the “grande demonstrance de sa vertu,” of the inner and outer response to misfortune of Dido's active virtue:

[…] elle, estant succombée en la calamité de tenebreuse infortune, fit apparoir la reluisance de sa magnanimité, de telle forte que par elle fut construicte & edifiée la noble cité de Carthage. […] O que selon le jugement d'un chascun, elle fut digne de louange, puis que sa grande vertu en telle extremité la rendit constante.

(EF8/sig. K2^v-K3^r)

There are many other notable women as heroines singled out by Hélisenne for their performance of manly works, for their being exceptionally rational, self-controlled, courageous, active, creative, and so forth. There are far too many to list them all. But each and every time her husband denigrates woman (which amounts to every time he speaks and resurrects a passage from literature to comment on), she is quick to counter his blind male perspective. Anger or anguish transformed into “œuvres viriles” is what Hélisenne saw in all the great heroines she admired from the Greeks to the Bible to the Renaissance. Among these is the Biblical heroine Judith whom Saint Jerome considered “non seulement digne d'estre imitée des femmes mais aussi des hommes” and who exercised “telle vertu qu'elle a obtenu victoire de celui qui demeuroit invincible de tous, & a supedité celui qui estoit insuperable.” (What she “procured”—“a supedité”—was the severed head of Holophernes, the Assyrian general who was attacking the Israelites.) And then there is “Camila roine des Volquains [qui] à la discipline militaire avec magnanimité virilement s'exerça.” Through the manly accomplishments of such women, “les histoires hebraiques et grecques sont decorées & anoblies” (EI3/sig. 02^r-v).

The “Fourth Invective Letter” contains the best narratives of the “œuvres viriles” performed by Hélisenne's heroines, as well as being a tour de force in countering the patriarchal views of her most unenlightened husband. Here once again she is very consciously reading and writing like a woman, in the exact modern sense of the term of a feminist critique: she is correcting old male scholarship that excludes with new feminist scholarship that includes. She is applying, constructively, feminist critique to assert the struggle for woman's rights, for social, cultural, and especially literary-intellectual equality and acceptance. This letter by itself is enough to refute her husband's “superbes & audacieuses parolles,” his “temeraire follie,” his “presumption [qui l'] offusque & aveuglit” when he says and promotes the idea that if things are to continue the way they should be (which would amount to suppressing Hélisenne's and all feminine writing), he “prohiberoi[t] le benefice literaire au sexe feminin, l'improperant de n'estre capable des bonnes lettres” (sig. 03^v; sig. 04^v). The point of this letter is to demonstrate, through applied feminist criticism, just the opposite perspective: that outstanding accomplishments in literature and in writing in a skillful and forceful and authoritative manner have been achieved by many female figures, who certainly are capable of rivaling and even at times outdoing (outreading and outwriting) their male counterparts in history (with the intended meaning of course that Hélisenne as character-author outreads and outwrites her husband on this score!). She teaches her husband a few basic lessons from history. Since he considers himself, intellectually, as the very descendant of Jupiter, she reminds him that it was not male intellectual acuity but something else that sprang from Jupiter's brain—female strength and wisdom embodied in Athena: “Tellement qu'en ta pensée tu crois estre procréé du cerveau du grand Jupiter, duquel fut produite Pallas, deesse de fortitude et de prudence” (sig. 03^v). In spite of the high intellectual esteem in which he holds himself, she also reminds him that, contrary to his opinion, he is not “plus docte que les personnes qui anciennement faisoient residence à la fonteine […] de Pegasus” (sig. 03^v-04^r). In no way does he, again contrary to his beliefs, “exceder en recit des hystoires la memorative Clio,” nor “preceder en narration de tragedies Melpomené,” nor “en commedies Thalie,” nor “en moduleuse resonnance Euterpe,” nor “en melodie Terpsicore,” nor “en geometrie Eratho,” nor “en literrature Calliope,” nor “en cognoissance du cours celeste Urania,” nor “en rethorique Polimia” (sig. 04^r)! “Toutes telles tiennes presumptions,” indeed, as she tells him later on, “me provocqueroient à rire, n'estoit qu'en te travaillant pour t'exalter, tu t'esforces de totalement deprimer les autres. Et par especial tu increpes & reprens la muliebre condition” (sig. 04^v)! Hélisenne then continues to narrate a long list of distinguished literary and cultural heroines, a veritable pantheon of female intellectual figures and feminist scholarship: the daughters of the orators Lelius and Hortensius who, through their writing abilities, made “l'elegance de leurs peres singulierement recommandée”; Damas, Pythagoras' daughter, who “fut si tres savante en Philosophie qu'apres que les trois seurs eurent coupé le fil vital à son pere, elle exposoit les difficultez de ses sentences”; Queen Zenobia who “fut tellement instruicte par Longin philosophe que par l'habondance & reluysante science des escritures fut nommée Ephinisa, dont Nicomachus translata les saintes & sacrées œuvres”; Deborah who “en grec […] fut tant prudente & discrette que comme on lit au livre des Juges, pour quelques temps exerça l'office de judicature sus le peuple d'Israel”; the Roman Valery who “fut si experte en lettres grecques & latines qu'elle expliqua les vers et metres de Virgile, à la foy & aux misteres de la religion chrestienne”; Aspasia who “fut de si extreme sçavoir remplie que Socrates philosophe tant estimé ne fut honteux d'aprendre quelque science d'elle”; Aresta “femme tres sçavante [qui] fut mere d'Aristipus philosophe, lequel du commencement elle instruict en philosophie”; and so on and so on with the depiction of many other famous women and their accomplishments from the past, heroines and role models in cultural, intellectual, and literary history with whom to enlighten her husband's patriarchal blindness. Hélisenne ends her discussion of the “louables œuvres des dames sçavantes”: “Ainsi furent excellentes poetrices & oratrices: Capiola, Lucera, Sapho & Armesia surnommée Androginea” (sig. 04^v-05^v).

So as not to forget the present, Hélisenne highlights one particular “dame sçavante” in whom she sees in the Renaissance the culmination and excellence of all feminine progress, one in whom she finds the true female exemplar of manly works. This person is none other than the illustrious Marguerite de Navarre. To debunk her husband once and for all, Hélisenne describes how this one woman combines all the heretofore seemingly manly virtues of past culture, all the accomplishments for which the four most acclaimed male philosophers and writers in all of history were so esteemed by their male descendants, and who had been used by the latter (and Hélisenne's husband in particular!) as male paradigms to promote male superiority/domination and female inferiority/exclusion. Hélisenne defiantly undermines male wisdom and authority by portraying this wisdom and this authority in Marguerite. Here is Hélisenne's passage on Marguerite, truly the apogee of feminine consciousness and feminist writing in the Epistres:

Mais si toy malheureux veulx perseverer de dire que je ne fay mention que des anciennes, & que pour le present n'en est à celles que j'ay predict equiparables, à cela je te respons tes dictz estre de la verité alienez. Car je n'estime point qu'au passé jamais fust, ne pour l'avenir peult estre, personne de plus excellent & hault esprit que la tres illustre & magnanime princesse, ma dame la Royne de Navarre. C'est une chose toute notoire qu'en sa royalle, excellente & sublime personne reside la divinité platonique, la prudence de Caton, l'eloquence de Cicero & la socratique raison. Et à brief parler, sa personne est tant acomplie que la splendeur d'icelle à la condition feminine donne lustre.

(sig. 05^v-06^r)

To be sure, the above reversed portrayals of women “exerçant œuvres viriles” are the more effective and powerful because Hélisenne always depicts her husband (and quite often men in general) as not embodying these same viril character traits and performing similar accomplishments. This too is part of her feminist writing of reversibility, assigning to her husband those traits and qualities and actions which he had always criticized her and other women for: those of being irrational, emotional, uncreative and so forth; in short, those most patriarchally viewed disabilities making the accomplishment of “œuvres viriles” impossible. A few examples, among many others which could be cited, will show what I have in mind. In these passages, Hélisenne is writing as a woman more than simply as a wife when she reverses the “manly” virtues of reason and steady self-control in her husband, who is depicted as exploding into mindless emotion and utter lack of control, into male hysteria:

Il est facile à conjecturer que si avec pensée reposée tu avois distinctement considéré mes escriptz […]

Au moins si ton ire n'estoit plus fondée en l'appetit de me persecuter qu'en la raison […]

Parquoy donnant lieu à fureur, par dessus raison superiorité obtint […]

(EI1/sig. M4^v-M5^r)

Tu es si remply d'insolence que la raison te deffaillant, […] generalement tu detestes la feminine condition.

(EI3/sig. N6^v-N7^r)

How far indeed are we the readers from the “socratique raison” and “œuvres viriles” of Marguerite and of Hélisenne's other heroines! In her revision and rewriting of the patriarchal principle, which amounts to the rewriting of cultural and intellectual history, Hélisenne asserts the female meaning and female possibilities of manly accomplishments to foster sexual equality, to counter the patriarchal strategy of exclusion of female participation in this history. She challenges the principle that defines human wisdom, strength, and action as male. Hélisenne's own participation in “exerçant œuvres viriles”—her right to read and write like a woman, her courage and determination to pursue literature and writing as she envisions them, indeed the creative acts themselves of conceiving and writing the 18 epistles—is, finally, an optimistic plea of hope.⁵ This participation is the eternal feminist hope that the future will not continue to be written, or read, conventionally in male-dominating, female-excluding terms of “œuvres viriles.” If so, she as woman, or, by implication, some other woman will always stand ready to strike back by wielding the pen and rewriting in even stronger terms to insure a feminine presence and standing in literature and cultural-intellectual progress. As Hélisenne herself warns her chief male antagonist at the end of her “Fourth Invective Letter”:

Mais si […] tu persistes en ton antique folie, qui seroit cause de faire esmouvoir la fureur de ma plume, laquelle me stimuleroit te rescrire propos plus fascheux que tu ne pourrois precogiter!

(sig. 08^r-v)

It is clear that one of the main goals of feminist studies today is to reopen and enlarge the literary canon by recovering lesser known works, usually written by women, which herald the accomplishments and performative standing of woman. In our ongoing revision of the early modern period, Hélisenne's Epistres deserve to be included. As a cultural-literary corrective testament on woman, these letters can bring a more balanced light to our own rereading and rewriting of the Renaissance itself.⁶

Notes

1. On this point very recently, see Renée Hubert's “Preface” in her exciting edited collection of essays on Women, Gender, Genre, in L'Esprit Créateur, 29(1989), especially pp. 3-4.

2. Quotations from the Epistres will be from the facsimile edition of Hélisenne's Œuvres of 1560 (Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1977). All editing of this Renaissance text is mine (the modernization of i and j, u and v, m or n for the tilde, etc., and the addition of accents and punctuation where needed for intelligibility). Each reference will include “EF” or “EI” to designate “familiar” or “invective” letter, followed by the number of the letter and page number. Since the initial blank leaf was not reproduced in the facsimile edition, rectos and versos appear side by side. The only modern edition of Hélisenne's letters, including an excellent historically oriented discussion of them, is the edited translation in English by M. M. Mustacchi and P. M. Archambault, A Renaissance Woman (Syracuse University Press, 1986). As good as this translation is, those few translations of Hélisenne in this study are my own. Also, unless otherwise indicated, all italics are mine.

3. Jane Marcus, Art and Anger: Reading Like a Woman (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1988) and Judith Fetterly, The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to American Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1971). See also Elaine Showalter, “Towards a Feminist Poetics,” in Mary Jacobus, Women Writing and Writing About Women (London: Croom Helm Ltd., 1979), pp. 22-41, where she divides modern feminist writing and its criticism into two distinct varieties: the one concerned with “woman as reader” which she calls “feminist critique” and the other with “woman as writer” or “gynocritics.” As we shall see, Hélisenne in her Epistres affords the reader-critic both varieties.

4. In the passages from Hélisenne's letters I am discussing, there is also at issue, in addition to the cultural and intellectual deprecation of woman, the question of feminine morality, or rather the lack thereof—her husband's views on her and on woman as sexual degenerates. Such views Hélisenne forcefully and skillfully refutes. This moral-ethical dimension of the Epistres is too vast to treat here and will comprise the subject of a separate study.

5. It is at the same time her original contribution to an ongoing “translatio studii” with a female difference. Hélisenne borrows much of her thematic material concerning exemplary woman from Boccaccio's De claris mulieribus and from Cornelius Agrippa's De nobilitate et praecellentia feminei sexus. She also, generically, seems to adopt, though for altogether different, in fact opposite, ends, the satirical view of Juvenal: “Si natura negat facit indignatio versum qualemcumque potest,” which can be paraphrased: “Indignation will supply the power of writing in any literary mode which nature may have denied me” (Liber primus, Satire I, lines 79-80, in J. D. Duff, ed., Fourteen Satires of Juvenal [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1957]). For Hélisenne too, indignation or anger becomes a conscious literary mode to vent her ideas; it “makes” (produces) feminist writing, the writing of invective letters. By borrowing (but of course adapting for her own ends) in this intertextual fashion both her inventio and elocutio from famous men, Hélisenne herself, as a writer, “exerce œuvres viriles.”

6. I am of course referring to the revision of the Renaissance undertaken recently by Margaret W. Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy J. Vickers in their stimulating collection of essays on Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986). For French authors treated, see the essay on Rabelais by Carla Freccero and the two on Louise Labé by François Rigolot and Ann Rosalind Jones.