Women Poets of the Renaissance

Abstract

Although women of the Renaissance were expected to be chaste, silent and obedient, many women poets risked the disapproval of their own society and transcended the strictures of contemporary female behavior in words that still resonate today. Their meditations on the danger and sufferings of motherhood and their descriptions of the vagaries of love, while couched in the formal style of Renaissance poetry, often appear startlingly close to modern experience. As a consequence, the range of poetry produced by Renaissance women is remarkably broad. In Women Poets of the Renaissance the poetry of these women is collected for the first time in an anthology that offers the twentieth-century reader a fresh and unique approach to literature of the period.

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