ABSTRACT
The last several decades of theorizing on early modern conceptions of sex and gender have brought to light a vision of male and female conflation that suggests that what Ronsard imagines might have been grounded in physiological reality. In the Renaissance world view, Dorat was already more maternal than more modern critics might give him credit for. The project undertakes discovers what a feminist critique of canonical male authors can tell how gender informs the praxis of men's writing of the Renaissance. This chapter propose gendered readings of canonical male writers who masculinize maternity in order to empower their writing coopting women and women's roles to further the cause of the French literary tradition, and, perhaps more importantly, their own quest for immortality. Given this contextualization of Ronsard's poetics of maternal appropriation, there remains an array of similar literary texts where the recurrent image of men as mothers further illuminates this masculinist agenda.
