Autobiography, Authorship, and Artifice: Reconsidering Renaissance Women Poets

Modern scholars now widely agree that for the male poets of the Pleiade, originality consisted of the creative manipulation of established literary models. Yet when studying female poets of the same period, preoccupations with "authenticity" of the poetic subject persist. Scholars often continue to read works by women as autobiographical confessions, as unmediated utterances of personal passion, or as expressions of a uniquely feminine sensibility.;In this dissertation I show that poems by Louise Labe, Madeleine de l'Aubespine, and Mary, Queen of Scots do not differ in composition, meaning, or essence from the works of their male contemporaries. Instead of conflating the female author with her poetic persona in an attempt to reconstruct socio-historical realities or gender-specific identities outside the text, I analyze poetry by women as typical cases of literary prosopopeia. I situate poems by female authors alongside similar works by their male contemporaries in order to illustrate how writers of both sexes drew inspiration from Latin and Italian texts by Ovid, Petrarch, and Ariosto. After showing that Renaissance poets did not represent contemporary men or women as speakers, but rather fashioned original, yet highly mediated, poetic personae who functioned in an intertextual literary universe, I suggest that the differences in the final products are best understood and appreciated as reflections of the creative talents, not the sex, of the author.