Marguerite de Navarre and the Querelle des femmes

The articles in this special issue honor Régine Reynolds-Cornell, professor emerita of French at Agnes Scott College, whose research focused on women writers in the Renaissance, especially Marguerite de Navarre. This introduction outlines Reynolds-Cornell’s and these authors’ contributions to scholarship on Marguerite’s role in the Querelle des femmes, an early modern debate on the status of women. Although Marguerite does not mount a clear-cut defense of women in her works, she nonetheless subtly questions prevailing social perceptions through her strong female characters, offers fresh perspectives on long-enduring misogynistic discourses, and depicts the challenges for real women in sixteenth-century France.