Laura, Petrarch, absence, silence, indiscreet, female speech, Renaissance, Tudor, Plutarch, Aspasia

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She that me lerneth to love and suffre
And will that my trust, and lustes negligence
Be rayned by reason, shame, and reverence
With his [Love’s] hardines taketh displeasure. (ll.5-8) ³⁹²

Although Laura serves an important pedagogic role here, urging Petrarch to curb his indiscreet “lustes negligence” and guiding him towards self-knowledge, this is reported speech, and Laura is characterised by her absence and silence as well as her inaccessibility. The female-voiced courtly answer-poem, however, by playing Laura to the Petrarch of the poem answered, undermines this idealistic association between women’s continence and their silence and invisibility, and introduces a direct female response that is pedagogic and condescending in its chaste deflection of the lover’s advances. ³⁹³

Through their evasion of the connection between sexual prolificacy and garrulity these articulate, female-voiced respondents call attention immediately to the sexualisation of female speech in the Renaissance as antitypes of the usual stereotype. The connection between female eloquence and concupiscence was rooted firmly in Early Modern thought, and classical and contemporary literature provided a wealth of examples. ³⁹⁴ As literary antitypes, these answers are endowed with the virtue of Laura and the intellectual competence of female rhetoricians while often maintaining the abrasive humour of the scold as another means of self-defence. The answer-poets of the mid-Tudor court then,

³⁹² Collected Poems of Sir Thomas Wyatt, ed. Kenneth Muir and Patricia Thomson (Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 1969), no. 4.
³⁹³ In his De Institutione Feminae Christianae Juan Luis Vives writes of his ideal model of feminine virtue that, “if she be good, hit were better to be at home within, and unknowen to other folkes. And in company to holde her tonge demurely. And let fewe se her, and none at al here her”, Hyrde trans. (2001), Bk 1, IV. xxiii.

³⁹⁴ Vives cites the classical example of Postumia, “the priestess of Vesta, [who] was accused of incest solely because of her unrestrained laughter and her too free discussions with men”, De Institutione Feminae Christianae, Bk 1, XI. ci. Others instances can be found in Plutarch’s Lives such as that of Aspasia, who claimed Socrates as one of her pupils, and was the mistress of Pericles, trans. Bernadotte Perrin, ed. E. Capps, T. E. Page and W. H. D. Rouse, LCL, 11 vols (Heinemann; NY: Putnam’s Sons, 1914-26), III. (1916), ‘Life of Pericles’, 24. 1-7.

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