ABSTRACT
Long before the notorious, mid-sixteenth-century English “pamphlet wars” debating the nature of women, several poetic translations printed in the 1520s brought the topic before the English reading public. This chapter takes up three long French-born poems on the topic, selected to show the considerable range of the printers’ and translators’ interventions. The Interlocucyon, with an argument, betwyxt man and woman ... (1525), translates a witty, sophisticated gender-debate poem; the Letter of Dydo to Eneas (1526) is a paradigmatic complaint against a man’s betrayal; and the Beaute of Women (1525, 1540) is a proscriptive, didactic poem that anticipates certain features of later printed prose conduct books. Although these poems apparently found healthy readerships, even the one that is best known now, the anonymous Interlocucyon, is not often read now even among scholars.1 In each case, questions about women’s worth are posed in explicit or implicit contrast to assumptions about men’s worth. And in each case the translators and printers make significant interventions-both visual and verbal-changing the implications of the French material.
