ABSTRACT
Those who write against women and marriage, says the male speaker of this complaint, are “Tryfelers” (l. 266), “lyers” (l. 268), and “bastardes” (l. 296); the speaker dismisses such traditional antifeminist and misogamist authorities as Theophrastus, Jean de Meun, and Mathéolus. Poems disputing the usual misogynist line had occupied a secure if beleaguered position in French gender discourses since Christine de Pizan’s famous querelle de la Rose / querelle des femmes. And in England, by the mid-sixteenth century, printed pamphlets debated “woman questions” in prose. However, a century after Christine’s querelle and a half-century before the English pamphlet wars on gender, a complex, contentious literature about men, women, sex, love, and marriage was reaching English readers in early printed translations. These French-born poems seem to have been less secure and possibly more beleaguered in their new English milieu, judging from patterns of publication and the printers’ efforts to naturalize them.
