












































Baroque Flair: Seventeenth-century European Sapphic Poetry


Humanist Studies & the Digital Age, 1.1 (2011) 
ISSN: 2158-3846 (online) 
http://journals.oregondigital.org/hsda/ 
DOI: 10.5399/uo/HSDA.1.1.1176  
 

  151 
 
 

 

Baroque Flair: Seventeenth-century European Sapphic Poetry 
Amanda Powell, University of Oregon 

Abstract: Early modern women poets across Europe and at least one colony 
enlisted Petrarchist terms, often with a self-aware, parodic twist. Some 
examples, considered here, include (first) self-portrait poems that serve to 
critique not only the lyric speaker/portrait subject’s imperfect face or 
physique, but the very phenomenon of Petrarchist lyric objectifications of 
female love objects, and (second) love poems addressed by women to other 
women. By applying a theoretical grounding that combines feminist, lesbian, 
and queering approaches, we can bring to these poems a reading that is alert 
to moments when they reproduce, rework, or contest the kinds of gendered 
discourse and heteronormative paradigms that we find in better-known male-
authored poems. The essay concludes with a survey of the kinds of cultural 
work performed by these texts in their ideological, religious, political, and 
poetic contexts. As cultural premises changed, the poems moved from 
widespread presence into illegibility or erasure from literary historiography. 

For over three centuries, literary history erased, forgot, or became unable to account for 
the once-prestigious poetic phenomenon of women’s engaged reshapings of Petrarchism. 
Women poets took up the terms, concerns, and conventions of the dominant lyric language 
for profane love but with a difference that marks their awareness of and engagement with 
gender hierarchies. This essay briefly introduces two types of texts by women who 
demonstrated their poetic mastery while often, it would appear, having fun with 
convention: satirical self-portraiture and love poetry by women to women. In the early 
modern period, across Europe and in at least one colony, women’s love poems to women 
appeared in print and manuscript circulation in Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, English, 
French, Flemish, and Dutch. 

The 1611 Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española by Sebastián de Covarrubias gives as 
one sense of humano (alternately, for modern English, human or humane): “Humanarse: 
humillarse y reconocerse, ser cortés con todos y afable, aunque sea gran señor” (“To become 
human: to humble oneself and know oneself well”) (704).1 Reconocerse suggests knowing 
one’s own limits and acknowledging what is due to others. Humanarse appears in modern 
dictionaries as both to “become more human” and, especially as preserved in Latin 
American Spanish, with a sense of “condescend” (see for instance Simon & Schuster’s 
International Dictionary). What does “human” mean for “humanism” and the “humanities,” 
when we consider one two-century slice of the past and its lyric expressions of gender and 
sexuality? In the early modern period, as now, we can perceive the force of cultural efforts 
to put “woman” back into “human,” observing how easily this works for some thinkers and 

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how uneasy or condescending it makes others. A “reconocimiento”—an epistemological 
acknowledgment—of same-sex desire and fulfillment informs the classics but was avoided 
or misrepresented by some European humanists, while others recalled and drew on it. Early 
modern women poets enlisted the classical past, along with other cultural spheres of 
prestige—including politically powerful queens and the parallel courts of noblewomen, the 
divinized Virgin Mary herself as “Queen of Heaven,” visually prevalent images of femmes 
fortes and viraginous women—to assert a rounded, vital, and even humorous humanity for 
themselves.  

Early modern women poets frequently critique a self-serving male self-regard inherent in 
the Petrarchist paradigm. As Frederick Goldin remarks, “a poet’s idealized lady can function 
psychologically as a narcissistic idol, a reflection of himself” (103). As scholars today (re-) 
locate and (re-) publish early modern women’s lyric, a woman-authored anti-Petrarchism 
that satirized such male self-regard comes into view. Women poets enlist, but also call into 
question, Petrarchist paradigms and vocabularies. To date, scholars largely ignore or dismiss 
the great number of poems in which they do this—whether because they are unfamiliar with 
these female-authored texts or because they lack critical paradigms adequate to the task of 
assessing them. Women poets tend to deploy Petrarchist discourse in ways that openly or 
tacitly critique both the conventional narcissistic self-regard noted by Goldin and the 
corresponding fragmentation and objectification of the beloved famously commented on by 
Nancy Vickers (“Diana Described”).2 They frequently take up familiar and culturally prized 
elements of Petrarchism, such as the blazon, to make loving address to other women. Often 
well-regarded and circulated in their own period, these texts for the most part remain 
unknown, overlooked, or squeamishly “explained away” to the present day.3 In Currency of 
Eros, Ann Rosalind Jones notes women’s efforts to insert and (decorously) assert themselves 
in a dominantly masculinist lyric discourse of love. Two salient, linked aspects lie beyond 
Jones’s study of poetic strategies: one, the satirical spin that energizes women’s citing, use, 
and evocation of Petrarchism; another, the range of friendly, loving, devoted, passionate, 
and/or erotic address that female poets make to women.  

Why are the poetic texts in this category so little known? For one thing, they have not 
been collected, or recollected, in anthologies. Masculinist and hetero-normative—or 
perhaps, more directly, homophobic—definitions of humanism have been produced from 
the early modern period to the present. As a brief introduction to a few poets and lyric texts 
that were once better known and now await further exploration, I present here a few cameo 
appearances and snapshots, as it were, from the European and Colonial late-1500s and 
1600s. In the present context, we might ask not just why or how these poems come into 
being, but why Petrarchism? How can a tradition of suffering in “icy fires,” let alone of 
representing women’s fragmented physical parts to the exclusion of their subjectivity, serve 
women’s poetic aims? Where do women access the discursive strategies that they employ? 
My conclusion below suggests ways to theorize and explore this prolific work that awaits 
our attention.  



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Satirical Self-Portraiture 
A zesty anti-Petrarchist satire appears in a poetic self-portrait by Catalina Clara Ramírez 

de Guzmán (b. 1611- d. after 1663).4 Ramírez de Guzmán, from a family of prominent 
Catholic ecclesiastics and civic figures in provincial Llerena, Extremadura, Spain, 
participated energetically in contests sponsored by poetry academies. Her elegiac, topical, 
and satirical verse circulated in manuscript and in cancionero compilations. Her poetry 
employs Petrarchist commonplaces of lavish flattery and protestations of devotion, for 
example, in encomiastic missives addressed to her mother and sisters. A humorous self-
portrait poem holds special appeal for investigators of female anti-Petrarchism. Appearing 
with the epigraph “Retrato de la autora, habiéndosele pedido un galán suyo” (Portrait of the 
author, because one of her suitors requested it), the text follows convention to represent 
female body parts—the speaker’s—fragment by fragment, using the coplas de pie quebrado 
(or “broken-foot” stanzas) alternating paired eight- and four-syllable lines, abcabc. She 
employs an arte menor, popular-verse form (which is in fact complex, compositionally 
demanding, and enlisted for learned poetry as much as for informal satires). Her use of this 
structure in itself signals a casual relationship to high-Italianate tradition, demonstrating a 
relaxed, colloquial posture towards the enshrined conventions of Petrarchism.  

The speaker apparently puzzles out, in the act of utterance and enumerating piece by 
Petrarchist piece, the problem of how suitably to portray herself without misrepresenting 
her own attributes or failing in culturally imposed modesty. The “galán suyo,” an interested 
suitor, seems from the epigraph to have asked for a description prior to a first meeting or 
perhaps a memento of already successful encounters. The exchange of courtship portraits in 
minute as well as larger and more formal scale was common early modern practice. In other 
words, the poetic exchange suggests a premodern social-media format, a cancionero 
Facebook or Match.com posting.  

Ramírez de Guzmán’s humor not only inverts but jestingly outdoes the characteristic 
“power play” identified by Ann Rosalind Jones as “involved in exposing a female beloved to 
the view of male connoisseurs in the descriptive enumeration of the blazon” (7). As the 
poem diminishes self as subject through word play, it wittily dismisses the genre of 
Petrarchan portrait as the measure of the value of a woman: 

Un retrato me has pedido, 
y aunque es alhaja costosa 

a mi recato, 
por lograrte agradecido, 
si he dicho que soy hermosa, 

me retrato. (lines 1-6) 
You’ve asked me for my portrait, 
a jewel a bit too dear 

for my pudeur; 
if I say that I’m no eyesore 
to satisfy you, then myself I here- 



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with draw. 

The topos of the admirer-voyeur who gazes on (that is, reads) a Petrarchist portrait-poem 
draws on already heavily overdetermined convention. This first stanza undoes the cliché in 
a few strokes. In effect, “that I am beautiful is all you want to know, and about all one ever 
does know of the ‘lady’ anyway. My beauty must be stated, being in parts and sum the chief 
constituent element of the conventional portrait you request; therefore, the statement is the 
portrait. But the obligation to declare attractiveness undermines another requisite: my 
‘feminine’ modesty, wherein lies my virtue.” Punning underscores this send-up: Ramírez’s 
verb “retratarme” signifies both “to portray myself” and also “to retract what I have said” 
(because in the period, no significant orthographic difference existed between “retratarme” 
and “retractarme”).5 The text undoes the idea of beauty precisely while producing the usual 
catalogue of traits. Indeed it overrides admiration for physical beauty entirely, replacing 
looks with savvy.  

One hundred and thirty-eight lines catalogue ravishing attributes, such as her nose “right 
between the eyes” (line 54) and “passable” throat (line 73). Directly alluding to Garcilaso de 
la Vega’s sonnet XXIII (“En tanto que de rosa y azucena / se muestra la color en vuestro 
gesto …”) and thus foregrounding a playful critique of Petrarchist antecedents, the lyric 
voice observes: 

Si es de azucena o de rosa 
mi frente, no comprendo 

ni el color; 
y será dificultosa 
de imitar, pues no le entiendo 

yo la flor. (lines 25-30) 

If my forehead’s more  
of a lily or a rose  

is hard to say; 
and I don’t know that I can render  
flowers I don’t really under- 

stand, anyway. 

This poem resonates with the blasón tradition as it emulates yet humorously overturns 
the overdetermined portrait-poem on female beauty. Implicitly critiquing Petrarchist 
commonplaces and conventional views, her text showcases lively wit and accomplished 
mastery of poetic discourse. Ramírez de Guzmán’s playful self-mockery, as it parodies a 
tiresomely oppressive discourse, invites comparison to a similar spoof in the ovillejo by Sor 
Juana Inés de la Cruz (a discussion of this spirited anti-Petrarchist satire concludes 
Bergmann and Middlebrook’s “Hollines y peces”). 



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Sapphic Satire 
Among the ways that early modern women poets work variations on Petrarchist 

conventions, their widespread address of love poems to other women is especially arresting, 
given the ongoing preoccupations with gender and sexuality of our present cultural period. 
Passionate poems foregrounding the female gender of both speaker and addressee circulated 
in print and manuscript, with Spanish, colonial New Spanish, English, Portuguese, Italian, 
French, Flemish, and Dutch examples. This lyric discourse pointedly satirizes longstanding 
convention, posing a humorous, loving mutual regard quite different from Petrarchist 
objectification of the beloved (Dugaw and Powell, “Sapphic Self-Fashioning”). Such poems 
also invoke longstanding female prestige inhering politically in courtly spheres and 
philosophically in Neoplatonic textual and visual references (Dugaw and Powell, “Feminist 
Road Not Taken”). 

Poems by women who address other women in passionately erotic terms constituted a 
fashion in the court-oriented lyric of Europe in the seventeenth and early eighteenth 
centuries.6 Petrarchan tradition offered poets familiar topoi—from the warm, enraptured 
gaze to the cold thud of disappointment—to be reworked and reimagined. This framework 
allowed women poets to articulate a woman-to-woman eroticism that functioned in what 
our era can view as a paradoxical combination of conservative and liberatory ways. The 
Petrarchist stance-with-a-difference allowed a voicing of female homosociality and 
homoeroticism in the context of aristocratic court circles and of the intellectually privileged 
bourgeoisie that invoked courtly cultural forms. Across Baroque cultures, women’s love 
poetry to women satirizes the silencing of women while it opens a space for female 
homoerotic passion and sexuality.7 

When scholars heed these texts at all, most declare them professions of friendship on a 
Renaissance model of amicitia, an observation neatly combining accuracy with 
squeamishness. Many of the poems do express affection, tenderness, and other bonds that 
characterize close friendship, and in some cases biographical evidence attests to a friendly 
association between writer and “real-life” addressee; some combine a loving address with 
flattery and solicitations of patronage. However, many poems of this type pointedly engage 
Petrarchist terms for the fleeting contentment and durable privations of erotic love, ardently 
moving beyond “standard” (if masculine poetic practice constitutes a standard) early 
modern forms of friendship-address.  

To insist dualistically that such poems “really” express either the affectionate bonds 
between “good friends” or “that era’s form of lesbianism”—or, for that matter, the care and 
feeding of a patron by a favored subject—is to miss their most interesting features. In any of 
these cases, why and especially how do poets take up the use of erotic language that was in 
their day, as it is now, long familiar from more “mainstream” traditions of male-authored 
love poems to women? What made these women-authored poems—frequently celebrated, 
circulated, and esteemed in their own day—become all but unreadable to moderns? 



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These poems often flaunt their enlistment of the conventional language of erotic love, by 
drawing the reader’s attention to a woman speaking to a woman as male lyric-speakers have 
done. It is interesting, but (alas) fruitless, to speculate on whether the woman author of a 
given love poem to a female addressee felt erotic longings for, or sought to consummate an 
extra-textual close encounter with, the woman poetically invoked. Just as fruitless as, say, 
attempting to detail how the historical Petrarch might respond were an eager, flesh-and-
blood Laura to appear in his boudoir; or whether anything—and if so what—transpired 
between the sheets of Garcilaso de la Vega and Isabel Freire, if actual sheets they ever crept 
between, beyond those of manuscript and printed folios. While critics seem to demand 
(impossible) extra-textual substantiating evidence before conceding the possibility of 
woman-for-woman’s lyric infatuation, they do not require this “higher evidentiary standard” 
(in historian Martha Vicinus’s term, 59) from lyrics of presumptively heterosexual address. 

From the context of colonial New Spain, or Mexico, the extensive epistolary-verse 
offerings of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1648-1695) to her beloved friend and patron, the 
Countess of Paredes, Vicereine María Luisa Manrique pose examples par excellence. In 
some poems, Sor Juana’s speaker invokes a long continuation of the medieval courtly love 
vein in which the lady was saluted with the masculine form “mi dons” (that is, “my lord”; 
Sautman and Sheingorn 30-31). The beloved “Lysi” (the vicereine) is variously called 
“Adorado Dueño mío” (my adored Lord; Juana Inés de la Cruz 93, line 29) or again “divino” 
and “hermoso Dueño” (divine / lovely Lord; 212, lines 25, 30). This corpus of poems springs 
from a context of known friendship. However, the texts playfully, passionately, or 
strenuously incite the reader to consider both the potency and the possible impropriety of a 
woman’s erotic lyric address to another woman, as in the poetically virtuosic romance 
decasílabo (ballad in irregular meter) that in working through terms of the blazon, praises 
the vicereine’s throat as a passageway to her breasts:  

Tránsito a los jardines de Venus,  
órgano es de marfil, en canora  
música, tu garganta, que en dulces  
éxstasis aun al viento aprisiona.  (Juana Inés de la Cruz 204-5, lines 37-40)  

Transiting to the sumptuous gardens of Venus,  
musical organ of marble, your sculpted throat  
captivates even the air, in bewitching  
ecstasies of a melody long and low. 

This poem and others clearly flaunt their reach beyond friendship to the erotic (Powell, 
“Sor Juana’s Love Poems Addressed to Women”). 

Anne de Rohan-Soubise (1584-1646), from a powerful ducal family in Brittany and 
Anjou, allied herself with dissenting Calvinists. Her extensive learning in Latin and Hebrew 
received admiring comment, while her manifest piety within a severe Protestant framework 
coexisted with an active poetic practice as précieuse and hostess to a bon-vivant salon in 
Paris. Her poetry, circulated and preserved in manuscript in keeping with salonnière 



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practices (Poésies, published in 1862; see also Stanton, “Anne de Rohan”), dashingly 
combines elegies to family and political figures (such as her “Stances sur la mort de Henry 
IV”) with passionate address to beautiful women.  

A quatrain to the Viscountess “d’Oulchy [d’Auchy]”—a distinguished bel esprit of the 
time (Poésies 75, n. 17)—enthuses in conventional Petrarchist style on eyes that are better 
termed “skies” in their celestial blue, yet “suns” in their capacity to set fire and wound:  

Ce ne sont pas des yeux, ce sont plutost des cieux, 
Aussy bien que les cieux ils ont la couleur bleue; 
Non, ce sont des soleils, car ils blessent le veue, 
De ceux qui de les voir sont trop curieux. (69) 

These cannot be eyes, these are rather heavens, 
for like skies above, their shade is deepest blue; 
no, they must be suns that blaze to burn the gaze 
of those who seek such loveliness to view. 

Another poem counsels a certain Isabelle of “beauté féconde” (“fertile beauty”) that 
speaker and beloved must be content with friendship (43). Despite mutual desires for 
further “amorous embraces” (“amoureuse braise”), heterosexual marriage is likely to make a 
supplanting claim on their hearts: 

… Il faut donc, chère Isabelle, 
D’une amitié mutuelle 
Contenter icy nos vœux; 
Que l’amoureuse braise, 
Qui vit dedans nous s’appaise …  
Offrant chacun le cœur sien 
Dessus l’autel de l’hymenée, 
Nos amitiés recompensées 
Par un conjugal lien. (lines 4-8, 10-13; 43) 

Well then, my dearest Isabelle, 
with a friendship warm and mutual 
we must appease our wishes; 
let the loving ember 
living in us both now slumber … 
Each one offering up her heart 
at hymen’s holy altar, 
loves exchanged, perhaps rewarded 
for a marriage bond. 

The lyric distinguishes between the proposed, redefined friendship (“amitié mutuelle”) 
with which speaker and addressee must be contented and the erotic embraces they formerly 
enjoyed.  



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A poem to Madeleine, who is called a “Belle de qui dépend ma vie” (“Beautiful lady on 
whom my life depends”), protests the beloved’s rejection and emphasizes the speaker’s 
ennoblement through suffering, both in highly conventional terms-with-a-gender twist:  

Non, je ne me plains, madame, 
De voir vostre fière rigueur, 
Car le beau sujet qui m’enflamme 
Ne me fait mourir qu’en douceur; 
Je tiens à honneur ceste peine 
Puisque c’est pour vous, Madeleine. (Poesies 48-49, lines 1-6) 

My lady, I shall not complain 
of your cruel severity, 
for the lovely one who sets me aflame 
does not slay me, save in sweetness; 
I am honored by this pain of mine 
because it is for you, Madeleine. (italics in original) 

These lyrics give no opportunity for inquiry (sadly undocumentable, although 
interesting) into what may have taken place between the speaker and Isabelle, or Madeleine, 
or other real or fictive beloveds, involving bodies or gifts or affections. Rather, we can make 
forthright examination of how women poets enlist the same poetic strategies deployed by 
male Petrarchists, to image-out the hope for, bliss during, or loss of amorous “conquest,” 
“possession,” or enjoyment. 

Anne de Rohan’s poems on the surface adopt numerous elements of Petrarchism and 
courtly love. But for the reader cognizant of the female gender of author and addressee, they 
incisively reinscribe those conventions. The poet’s elegant handling of prized cultural 
forms, first, demonstrates a female author’s capacity for poetic mastery: “Car le beau sujet 
qui m’enflamme / Ne me fait mourir qu’en douceur” (“for the lovely one who sets me aflame 
/ does not slay me, save in sweetness”). Subjectivity exquisitely refined by love—suffering is 
not an exclusively masculine domain. Second, as Jones points out, a woman poet’s 
“adulatory imitation” of a privileged discourse destabilizes “the gender system that 
prohibits her claim to public language—although with limited disturbance to that system” 
(4). These poems held further strong resonance for their period, as I suggest in my general 
conclusion below.  

Given limited space and time, I make abbreviated mention of a few more examples. The 
Portuguese Violante do Ceu (or in Castilian, del Cielo) adopts Petrarchism, like the Mexican 
Juana Inés de la Cruz, to make witty reformulations that not only emulate but send up those 
conventions. From a convent in Lisbon, in the same period—indeed, in a life extending for 
almost the entire seventeenth century (1601-1693[?])—she collected and published her 
combined secular and devotional poetry. The Rimas, composed in Portuguese and Castilian 
and issued in Nantes, France (1646), features poems addressed to women in various 
discourses of passionate love, wryly amused friendship, and the intense jealousy well-



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known from male and presumptively heterosexual (if homosocial) poets. Many of these texts 
evoke eroticism and seduction and then seem to enjoin—indeed enjoy—the reader’s likely 
discomfiture. For a sampling and analysis of this aspect of her verse, see my “‘Oh qué 
diversas estamos’” (73-80); a varying critical treatment appears in Adrienne Martín, 
“Rhetoric.” 

In Italy, Tarquinia Molza (1542-1617) received wide admiration (and in 1600, honorary 
Roman citizenship) as “L’Unica” for her intellectual, literary, and musical achievement. She 
served as choral director and poet at the famously magnificent house of the Duke Alfonso II 
d’Este (Jaffe 311).8 There, one scholar observes, Molza maintained openly “passionate 
relations with women friends, to whom her most emotional poetry is addressed,” whereas 
among her lyrics of love none can be identified as addressed to a masculine beloved (Riley 
99 n. 10).9 Irma Jaffe renders a section of one love poem thus: “I sobbed / with passion you 
aroused... / for the lover is tossed between / fire and waves” (320). Francesco Patrizi’s 
L’Amorosa Filosofia (1577), in the edition and translation by John Charles Nelson, remarks 
of Molza, “No other woman has ever enflamed so many hearts ...—in sum, [she is loved by] 
every manner of man, and no few women” (Riley 100, n 15). 

Isabella Canali Andreini (1562-1604), an internationally renowned actor, wrote 
acclaimed letters, plays, and poetry including the Mirtilla (1588), her Rime (1601), and the 
Lettere (1607 and various editions). Giovanna Rabitti observes that Andreini’s written texts, 
like her stage performances, speak both as and to women and men in flexible ways that 
“challenge the rigid boundaries of gender representation” (47-48), as in her “Madrigale IIII”: 

Se non temprate un poco 
Madonna il mio gran foco con quel gielo, 
Che’n voi nascose il Cielo, 
O se picciola dramma 
Non riceuete in voi 
De la mia immensa fiamma 
Temo, che Morte haurà di noi la palma, 
Di voi per troppo ghiaccio, e di mi poi 
Perche foco souerchio hò dentro à l’alma. (Rime 9) 

If, my lady, you do not somewhat check 
my raging fire with that icy chill 
that Heaven concealed within you, 
or if you will not take in  
the tiniest dram 
of my towering flame, 
I fear that Death will triumph over both— 
over you for too much freezing, and then me 
because of the excessive fire within my soul. 10 



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In Andreini’s trademark dramatic voicing, our old friends fire and ice evoke the lover’s 
passion and frustration.  

The English poets Katherine Phillips and Aphra Behn in England have received 
attention for their love poems to women, although most criticism does not treat their texts in 
the international context of European Baroque women’s poetry that substantially informs 
this aspect of their work as representative rather than exceptional. Phillips, renowned as 
“the matchless Orinda,” and Behn, who saw her theater works much produced in London 
and who published extensive lyric poems, were both celebrated in the period for deft, and 
sometimes buoyantly parodic, love poems to women (Dugaw and Powell, “Sapphic Self-
Fashioning” 135-41).  

Finally, Flemish and Dutch poets deserving recognition on their own and also as 
representative of this international, early modern vein of love poetry to women include 
Katharina Questiers (1631-69), Cornelia Van Der Veer (1639-1702?), Katharina Lescailje 
(1649-1711), and Titia Brongersma (late seventeenth century). Maaike Maijer and Lia van 
Gemert collect and discuss examples of their poetry that reveal characteristics of this 
international Petrarchist-Sapphic mode. 

Theorizing These Voices and These Loves 
Once the texts that identify sixteenth- and seventeenth-century women’s international 

flair for satirical and Sapphic reworkings of Petrarchism stand before us, we can enlist 
feminist, queer, historicizing, and discursive theories to open to view the poems and the 
cultural work they perform. First, numerous textual passages either suggest or highlight an 
awareness of participating in hierarchically gendered discourse traditions. Far from being 
anachronistic, feminist approaches are necessary to analyze the poems’ shaping of lyric 
discourse and the poets’ commanding of opportunities to make their work known.  

While it seems counter-intuitive to most modern viewpoints, many aspects of the 
Baroque period vitally empowered women’s intellectual and cultural activity, including the 
production of these poems. Queer theory provides useful perspectives for investigating how 
this was so, by offering ways to search against and through our own pervasive cultural 
assumptions about sexualities and their representations. Richly resonant emblemata of that 
period, grounded ideologically in Christian Neoplatonist philosophy and politically in the 
then-ongoing presence of women rulers and nobles, provided sources for creative and 
intellectual women through artifacts, spaces, and energies—but tend to be markedly 
misread, or simply erased, in modernity. These include visual images, literary exempla, 
religious processions and ceremonies, and real-world examples of unabashed, agency-
wielding women ranging from the divine Mother of God, to political power-brokering 
queens, various femmes fortes of legendary and commonplace description, female patrons of 
the arts and letters, and cross-dressing, far-roving women fighters (in the streets and on the 
stage).  



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To place women’s complex use of poetic convention in accurate context, we should 
account for how Petrarchist lyric discourse reaches them within a kind of “popular culture 
of the elite” within which they shape their opportunities. They are not necessarily reading 
specific poems in the canon by Francesco Petrarca himself—although that does occur for 
some women. These are more often readings-of-readings; so that (for example) in Spain and 
Portugal, the alluded examples include Garcilaso, Herrera, and company, as read and re-
written by Góngora, Lope, Quevedo, et al. Thus, by the late sixteenth and seventeenth 
centuries a mere note or two serves to summon recognizable melodies, harmonics, and 
overtones. Female and male poets give evidence of a rich mix of frustration as well as 
delight with an aging trove of imagery and poetic strategy. They enlist and renovate 
metaphors—jeweled, flowery, stony, architectural, and cosmic—along with clichéd 
antitheses and paradoxes that resonate with Neoplatonic and erotic significance. Women 
writers show equal familiarity, when compared to both much-studied as well as lesser-
known male poets, with how the too-familiar ingredients can be served up afresh to 
“fashion a self” or articulate subjectivity (at the risk of enlisting our present-day cliché-
trove).  

Taken as a group, Petrarchist satire and Sapphic love poems provide women poets with 
an equalizing discourse. Most basically, the authors display poetic prowess in the culturally 
prestigious lyric form. Discursively, this reworked Petrarchism confers dignity—with a wit 
all the more supple when it is humorously enacted—between intellectually and affectively 
equal subjects, the speaker and her female addressee. Such poems offer a valuable—and 
judging by their prevalence in the period, clearly valued—model of interaction that provides 
a variant for the gender hierarchy of Petrarchism. Time and again, the gender-bending 
address of women’s love poems to women does honor to the perfections of the beloved 
Lady. As seen above, Anne de Rohan addresses her Madeleine as a “madame” who rules 
over the speaker’s heart with “fière rigueur” (“cruel severity”). By speaking in female voice 
to address women, women poets expose gender convention as a regulated system that 
conceals possible alternatives.  

Male-authored Petrarchist love-suffering usually roots in relational opposition to, rather 
than pleasurable collaboration or interdependence with, the addressee. When women poets 
evoke this paradigm, the fact of female authorship and female-to-female address generates 
an ironic distance from tradition. Humorous or over-the-top deployment of Petrarchist 
imagery sets up a basis for recognition of the self in and with the “other,” similarly female 
beloved, rather than over/against her (see Powell, “Sor Juana’s Love Poems” 209, 213).  

In the early modern context, this deployment of Petrarchist homage works to reinforce 
women’s real-world lines of interchange of power and support. A now-deepening 
investigation of epistolary correspondences demonstrates vital practices among women 
ranging from queens to noblewomen to bourgeoisies for creating, nurturing, and maintaining 
political and financial as well as affective alliances.11 The widespread Sapphic love poetry 
in the period in part reflects the cultural importance of social network relations between 
women, to reveal another source of energy infusing these poems of love.  



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Finally, in many texts the lavish erotic imagery makes clear that, as love poems, they are 
just that and work familiar chords along with changes on Petrarchist harmonies to express 
friendly, fond, and amorous devotions of various sorts. For example, Sor Juana’s humor 
overturns poetic and social conventions to undo not only the paradigms that objectify, 
silence, and separate women but what our age terms the heteronormative groundings of 
these paradigms as well. Infused with all this charge (to shift metaphors), it is no wonder 
the poetry produced a kick. 
 

 
                                                
1 Unless otherwise noted, the translations here are mine.  I must reconocer with grateful 
acknowledgement Dianne Dugaw’s contributions to this essay, through our ongoing 
collaborative research on and thinking about these poems. 
2 Bergmann and Middlebrook read the dismembered “Petrarchan woman” in early modern 
Spanish literature; they treat Sor Juana’s resistance to the “problematic representation of 
woman’s desire and woman’s body,” especially in her satiric portrait-poem, romance no. 43, 
“Sobre si es atrevimiento” addressed to Elvira, Countess of Galve (153-54). 
3 See Powell, “‘¡Oh qué diversas estamos,/ dulce prenda, vos y yo!’” (especially 55-57) for an 
analysis of how seventeenth-century Spanish women’s love poems to women construct four 
explicit, grammatically marked modes of address: (1) explicitly female speaker to male 
addressee; (2) male speaker to female addressee; (3) female, or unspecified, to unidentified 
addressee; and (4) female speaker to explicitly female addressee. Each of these stances in 
individual poems, and the effects created collectively across a poet’s single interventions 
and manuscript or published collections, can work theatrically to deliver charged 
perspectives on presumably normative roles. These modes create space to elicit love’s ever-
present undercurrent, the consolidation or exchange of power.  
4 See my further discussion subtitled “Catalina Clara Ramírez de Guzmán: Humor, silence, 
violence” in “‘¡Oh qué diversas estamos….’” (68-73). The poet’s work is now available in a 
new critical edition: Catalina Clara Ramírez de Guzmán. Obra poética. Ed. Aránzazu 
Borrachero Mendíbil and Karl McLaughlin. Mérida, Spain: Editora Regional de 
Extremadura, 2010. 
5 Julián Olivares and Elizabeth Boyce note this pun (Tras el espejo 186, n. 6). 
6 Scholars who have observed this fashion in and (to some degree) across European 
literatures include Harriet Andreadis in Sappho in Early Modern England: Female Same-
Sex Literary Erotics, 1550-1714 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001); Emma 
Donoghue in Passions between Women: British Lesbian Culture 1668-1801 (NY: Harper 
Collins, 1993); Susan Lanser in “Befriending the Body: Female Intimacies as Class Acts,” 
Eighteenth-Century Studies, 32 (1998-99): 179-98 and in “‘Au sein de vos pareilles’: Sapphic 
Separatism in Late Eighteenth-Century France,” Journal of Homosexuality, 41 (2001): 105-
16; Adrienne Martín in “The Rhetoric of Female Friendship in the Lyric of Sor Violante del 
Cielo,” Calíope, 3 (1997): 57-71 and in “The Mediation of Lesbian Eros in Golden Age 
Verse” in Alain Saint-Saens and María José Delgado, Lesbianism and Homosexuality in 
Early Modern Spain: Literature and Theater in Context (New Orleans: University Press of 



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1.1 Winter 2011  163 
 
 

 
the South, 2000), 343-62; and Elizabeth Wahl in Invisible Relations: Representations of 
Female Intimacy in the Age of Enlightenment (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999).  
7 What do we talk about when we talk about non-normative discursive love? Taking as a 
chief point of departure Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality, literary and historical 
scholarship of the last thirty-plus years wrestles with how to conceptualize same-sex 
eroticism before the formation of modern sexual identities. Recent conceptualizations of 
erotic love between women in pre-modern texts include “same-sex love and desire between 
women” (Canadé Sautman and Pamela Sheingorn, “Introduction” in Sautman and 
Sheingorn, eds., Same-Sex Love and Desire among Women in the Middle Ages [NY: 
Palgrave, 2001]. 1-47); the “silent sin” (Alain Saint-Saens, “Homoerotic Suffering, Pleasure 
and Desire in Early Modern Europe, 1450-1750” in Alain Saint-Saens and María José 
Delgado, eds., Lesbianism and Homosexuality in Early Modern Spain: Literature and 
Theater in Context [New Orleans: University Press of the South, 2000].1-86); “female 
homoeroticism” (Bernadette Brooten, Love between Women: Early Christian Responses to 
Female Homoeroticism [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996]); “lesbian-like” (Judith 
Bennett, “‘Lesbian-like’ and the Social History of Lesbians,” Journal of the History of 
Sexuality, 9 [2000]: 1-24); “queer desire” (Valerie Traub, “Desire and the Differences It 
Makes” in Valerie Wayne, ed., The Matter of Difference: Materialist Feminist Criticism of 
Shakespeare [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991]. 81-114); “female intimacy” (Elizabeth 
Wahl, Invisible Relations); and “sapphism” (Susan Lanser, “Befriending the Body”). Given 
my own literary interest, and that of the writers considered here, I follow Lanser’s allusive 
term Sapphic for texts that express or suggest erotic love between women. This is not to 
assert for these poems or poets a textual, or sexual, identity anachronistic to the early 
modern, or genealogical connection to the Classical lyricist, but rather to supply collective 
terminology for the poems in question and, especially, to refuse the suffocating 
inconvenience of wordlessness. On this point see Marie-Jo Bonnet, “Sappho, or the 
Importance of Culture in the Language of Love: Tribade, Lesbienne, Homosexuelle,” in 
Queerly Phrased: Language, Gender and Sexuality, ed. Anna Livia and Kira Hall (New York: 
Oxford University Press, 1997).147-66. 
8 This patronage center in Ferrara shows the multi-media, courtly role for intellectual and 
creative women; Isabella Andreini starred there annually with her traveling theatre 
company, the Gelosi. Molza was leader of the Concerto delle Donne, a group of 
accomplished women musicians who performed private court concerts or musica secreta 
under the patronage of Duke Alfonso II (Jaffe 337, n. 20).  
9 By way of gender-contrast, Joanne Marie Riley notes that toward male addressees Molza’s 
poetry evidences “warm, affectionate friendship”—but not the passionate or erotic 
investment found in poems to women (23, n. 16).  
10 My thanks go to Nathalie Hester for her insightful reading of this poem, supplied in 
conversation.  
11 On early modern Spanish women’s use of epistolary networks to form, consolidate, and 
extend political power, see for example Romero-Díaz. 

 

 

 



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1.1 Winter 2011  164 
 
 

 

 
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	Baroque Flair: Seventeenth-century European Sapphic Poetry
	Amanda Powell, University of Oregon
	Satirical Self-Portraiture
	Sapphic Satire
	Theorizing These Voices and These Loves
	Works Cited


