ABSTRACT
In her classic Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe Merry Wiesner-Hanks decried the fact that, when studying early modern Europe, critics who addressed power hardly, if ever, referred to women, accepting a universal masculine experience as regards perspective and political action. As Nieves Baranda explains, the political recommendations, praises, and warnings contained in these women's writings are framed by proto-nationalist feelings. Encomiastic writings had an intrinsically political character because, whether in prose or in verse, their main goal was to praise persons or events of civil and political life with a clearly propagandistic purpose. The texts' popularity is noteworthy if we consider the way in which their contemporaries praised these women authors. The female authors, "aware of the sociopolitical meaning of the relacion, a genre at the service of power interests and utilized to create and form public opinion.
