Life during the 16th century in France afforded few opportunities for women to make their voices heard. Its rigidly patriarchal culture expected them to be dutiful wives, mothers and daughters, not opinionated politicians, poets and painters, like their male counterparts.
But buried in the pages of manuscripts, annotating the margins, exists a historical record that, until recent decades, had gone undiscovered. Here, women could take part in literary production, if only privately and tangentially.
“Living in a patriarchal world, women learned to creatively negotiate a landscape that forbade them from writing,” Brigitte Roussel, associate professor of French, said.