ABSTRACT
Chapter 3 details how focusing thematically upon material love tokens-from unspecified “ornaments” to a veritable cornucopia of paternal tokens-enables Eleanora Finch and Jane Cavendish to write lyrics resisting the sexualized objectification of women’s bodies and bawdy humor at women’s expense characteristic of male-authored poetic portraits of heteroerotic gifts. Going beyond the verse interventions of Finch and Cavendish, Mercy Harvey’s poetry meditates upon the asymmetrically gendered, coercive dynamics of prestation between men and women, and materially disrupts those dynamics. By contrast, the women poets I discuss in this chapter do not focus on heteroerotic courtship; instead, their poems revise commonplace deployments of love tokens in Renaissance lyrics to articulate specific kinds of relations between women, or between women and God or Christ.
