Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 62-10, Section: A, page: 3376.

Directors: Edwin Duval; David Quint.

This dissertation investigates the persistent tendency of European medieval and early modern writers, both male and female, to invoke a reading public of women. My analysis of the female addressee is concerned not only with historical women readers, but also with the woman reader as a textual fiction, a pretext allowing the author to construct the particular literary discourse he or she desires. Through close readings of French and Italian literary works, which date from the twelfth to the sixteenth centuries, I argue that the notion of writing for a woman opened up a range of creative possibilities for writers: it enabled them to produce literature in the vernacular rather than in Latin, to experiment with radically new literary forms, and to investigate questions relating to ethics, desire and the psyche.

Each chapter of the dissertation examines an individual text or set of texts, in order to highlight a different aspect of addressing women in literature. The first chapter analyzes address to women and literary subjectivity in four Old French verse romances: Le Bel Inconnu, Partonopeu de Blois, Le Roman du Castelain de Coucy et de sa Dame de Fayel, and Joufroi de Poitiers. The second chapter is devoted to Boccaccio's Decameron; it contends that for Boccaccio, the "compassione" of the woman reader offers a way to confront the social disorder of plague-ridden Florence. Chapter Three, which looks at the Oeuvres of the sixteenth-century Lyonnais poet Louise Labe, explores how the function of the female reader changes when a woman writer addresses herself to women. Chapter Four discusses desire, interpretation and reading in Boccaccio's Elegia di Madonna Fiammetta, a fourteenth-century romance in which a young woman relates the story of her adulterous love affair. Finally, the topic of Chapter Five is Helisenne de Crenne's Les Angoysses douloureuses qui procedent d'amours, published in Paris in 1538. By rewriting Boccaccio's Elegia and experimenting with different structures of address within the same text, Crenne plays on her readers' expectations and challenges accepted categories of gender and genre.