ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the early appearance of impotency texts in the vernacular, considering French and English impotency poems produced and circulated from the middle of the sixteenth century onwards. One of the earliest examples of a Renaissance impotency text appears in France with Rémy Belleau's 'Jan qui ne peult'. Christopher Marlowe's translated edition of Ovid's Amores, completed during his time at Cambridge is then the first appearance of the impotency poem in English. Berry notes that 'when Petrarchan and Neoplatonic attitudes were assimilated by the aesthetic ideologies of French and English Renaissance absolutism, the female beloved was closely associated with the mystical body of the Renaissance state; and in the context of Elizabethan courtly literature, with the monarch herself'. It is in this context that Marlowe and Nashe then respond to the impotency poem tradition.
