In Fall 2000, I taught a junior-level course called "Renaissance Women Writers in Context: Poetry, Romance, and Drama" that was cross-listed with Women's Studies courses at Eastern Illinois University. The course covered a selection of Italian, French, and English writers. For this project, I am compiling texts that could be taught in similar courses and including several texts that we have studied in this institute. The list includes texts from the Renaissance through the seventeenth century. It should also be noted that several of the primary texts listed here are no longer in print and would require inclusion in a course packet.

What follows, then, are some suggestions for:
a) introducing such a course,
b) a selection of texts by male and female writers, and
c) a selection of secondary sources.

Objective: My original course objective read as follows; however, as we have discussed these past weeks, many perspectives may be considered for selecting and grouping texts:

The general objective is to introduce students to the salon and academic culture of Renaissance Europe, emphasizing that the salons and academies were key influences upon the production of much literature of the period. Specifically, we will look at the lives and texts of several women writers who were members of salons and academies, and we will examine their writing in tandem with texts by their male contemporaries. The major theme that we will explore is the discontinuity of received history regarding Renaissance women, i.e., the notions that women were to be silent, chaste, and obedient, and were to be objects of spiritual and artistic inspiration for men vs. the facts that women were actively and vocally participating in salon and academic society, writing and publishing their work, and searching for ways to represent women's experiences in love in their writing. We will also look at the ways in which women writers engage in the Querelle des femmes and voice their disenchantment with Petrarchan and Neoplatonic literary conceits.