womens writing, translation, Renaissance women, courtly lady, patroness, Renaissance

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their intellectual and creative presences from their answers.

With the exception of works of translation, it is difficult to imagine another literary activity in which there is evidence for such a wide range of women having participated. In fact, answer-poetry represents an important juncture and a significant point of departure in the history of women’s writing. The status of translations and religious writings of Renaissance women have been considered extensively elsewhere, as have their roles as literary patronesses. ³⁶⁸ In comparison, although individual studies have been made of verse answers by women, their answer-poems have not been considered collectively as a mode of female literary expression in their own right. If, as Marotti claims, “feminist scholarship has drastically underestimated the literary activities of Renaissance women”, then it should be recognised that this is one area in which the participation of women is in need of attention. ³⁶⁹ In fact, women were presented, almost doubtlessly, with many more opportunities for private verse answering than they were with more involved and lengthy public literary exertions. A poem that addresses a woman as either courtly lady or patroness, or even satirically as a moral and intellectual inferior, expects an answer and is an injunction to break silence that might provide an opportunity to challenge the strong

³⁶⁸ Margaret Patterson Hannay, for instance, describes women’s roles as patrons and translators of religious texts as the “one exception to the silence required of women” in Silent but for the Word: Tudor Women as Patrons, Translators, and Writers of Religious Works, ed. Margaret Patterson Hannay (OH: Kent State UP, 1985), p.5. Hannay’s statement does require some qualification, however, as she herself has done much to highlight the secular writing undertaken by women. See, for instance, her Philip’s Phoenix: Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke (Oxford and NY: OUP, 1990), pp.107-9. See also Tina Krontiris, Oppositional Voices: Women as Writers and Translators of Literature in the English Renaissance (London and NY: Routledge, 1992), pp.63-101 (see particularly, pp.69-78). Jonathan Goldberg accuses these two writers of underestimating the importance of translation to the Renaissance humanist project, and therefore the significance of women’s translations. Although Goldberg’s point is valid, his polemical stance leads him to underplay the significance of women’s exclusion from other areas of literary production, Desiring Women Writing: English Renaissance Examples (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1997), pp.75-83.

³⁶⁹ Marotti (1995), p.49.

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