Querelles des femmesFrench Women Writers of the 15th and 16th Centuries

The articles in this issue are based on talks given at “Querelles des femmes: French Women Writers of the 15th and 16th Centuries,” an intimate colloquium held in the French section of the Department of Romance Languages at the University of Pennsylvania on Saturday, November 8, 2014. Our primary purpose in organizing this colloquium was to put scholars of medieval and Renaissance French in dialogue with one another, and to stress the common culture, concerns, and literary genres and techniques shared by writers from both periods. To facilitate this conversation, our speakers focused primarily on two seminal women writers, Christine de Pizan and Marguerite de Navarre, who bear a number of striking similarities to one another: both are widely acknowledged as proto-feminists who use their writing to challenge the misogynistic tropes and discourse common in both their respective periods, both simultaneously draw heavily on and react strongly against the corpus of courtly love literature and its authoritative texts (particularly Jean de Meun and Alain Chartier), and both reflect on what it means to write as a woman, and on how women writers must present themselves to their readers. As such, we deliberately avoided grouping our speakers according to whether they focused on Christine or Marguerite, instead opting to mingle médiévistes and seiziémistes so as to underscore these commonalities.