A lecture presented by Edwin Duval, Yale University, and sponsored by Renaissances, a collaborative research project in the Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages Research Unit.
Recent scholarship has advanced the idea that Petrarchan discourse precludes the female voice, thus posing a serious challenge to women who would be poets. The reality is more interesting, and more complex: the Petrarchan lover, like his courtly model, is already strongly marked "female." Lyric convention does not so much preclude as co-opt the female voice and female subjectivity. Maurice Scève emphasized this essential aspect of lyric amatory convention by means of strikingly original comparisons that explicitly cast the lover in the role of the woman, Délie in the role of the man.