'A wanton woman and a wise': Women writing about desire in Renaissance Europe, 1540-1620

This study addresses women's writing about love in renaissance Europe, and the social, intellectual and cultural forces that served to repress or liberate their discourses of desire. The Renaissance is a key period for women's writing because humanist ideals of education contributed strongly to the emergence of some liberated female voices in Europe. Equally, however, the ideal of feminine chastity was extended and developed in a number of genres concerned with feminine conduct. The net effect of these works was to suppress and police any possible language of female desire. "A Wanton Woman and a Wise" addresses moments of discontinuity and conflict in Marguerite de Navarre's Heptameron, Veronica Franco's verse and Mary Wroth's prose romance Urania. The contradictions in these women's discourses of desire are shaped by ideals of feminine conduct, but Marguerite de Navarre, Mary Wroth and Veronica Franco also subvert these ideals.;Marguerite de Navarre uses a circumspect authorial strategy which is directly contingent on the necessity for women to practice concealment so as to maintain their sexual reputations. The Heptameron is also a story about the behaviour it appears to condemn: that is, courtly seduction and flirtation.;Like Marguerite de Navarre, Mary Wroth has a split agenda. Her prose romance Urania has a streak of exhibitionism which contradicts the high value it places on feminine modesty. Urania places the conscience of a virtuous woman centre-stage. Yet the role of women's love poetry, of the literature of private passion or will, is central in the romance. The heroine's virtue gives her a right to speak, and thus to engage in a discourse of endlessly protracted desire. As with Marguerite de Navarre, the language of feminine virtue incorporates a subterranean language of jouissance.;Where Wroth and Navarre disobey the dictates of proper femininity in convert and cunning ways, the Italian courtesan poet Veronica Franco disobeys them openly. She celebrates her freedom of speech and is not-veiling but self-publicising and entrepreneurial. She de-idealises sexual relations, which are cast as battles of will in which she is determined to assert her autonomy. Yet Franco is still subject to the patriarchal culture that commodifies the sexuality of courtesans.