Women Writing in French

In some domains, women may not have had a Renaissance, as Joan Kelly suggests in a 1977 article that transformed forever the way that critics study the history of women (Kelly 1977, cited under Monographs). Nevertheless, important historical and sociocultural phenomena such as the advent of print, humanism, religiously inspired educational campaigns (Lutheran, Calvinist, and Catholic), and the impact of the Italian Renaissance on France’s cultural and intellectual life provided French women from the aristocracy and the upper-bourgeois milieu with unprecedented opportunities to acquire literacy, to argue and promote causes dear to them in literary salons that they themselves ran, to circulate their manuscripts among friends, and even to enter into the public world of print. Granted, French women of letters had to be inventive in order to maneuver within male-authored literary conventions, circumvent gender strictures, and establish a public, intellectual life in a society often hostile to their aspirations. But their early steps in the area of cultural expression were great, and their contributions as writers of nearly every literary form, as generous patrons of literature and the arts, and as producers of books are noteworthy. This article deals with these different aspects of 16th-century French women’s involvement in writing. Since the early 1990s, scholarship on French women and writing has been dominated by edited collections of essays organized around a particular theme or a particular line of inquiry. Most of these works compile the proceedings of international, interdisciplinary, and, more recently, transhistorical and cross-cultural conferences. Monographs that have appeared so far are traditionally more general in scope. Quite remarkable is the recovery of a number of female-authored texts since the early 1990s, and the greater availability, thanks to several publishing firms and collective scholarly efforts on both sides of the Atlantic, of well-known women writers as well as less familiar ones in the form of critical editions (scholarly or student oriented), bilingual editions and English translations to address the needs of the ever-growing field of interdisciplinary studies, anthologies containing textual extracts from a wide variety of women’s writings and genre-based anthologies, and digitized libraries and websites of all sorts. Remarkable as well is the growing number of dictionaries and encyclopedias that pay tribute to early modern women and their creativity.

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