Classical credentials: women's intellectual and sexual licence in sixteenth-century France

Engagement with the classics can be strategically useful for women, as it both confers intellectual authority upon them as writers and grants them a degree of sexual licence in their works. It also offers them opportunities to rewrite and to repurpose the classical world. This chapter focuses on three sixteenth-century French poets – Marguerite de Navarre, Louise Labé, and Madeleine de l’Aubespine – who invite us to reconsider a powerful female figure from the classical world: respectively, the goddess Diana, the Babylonian queen Semiramis, and Messalina, wife of the Roman emperor Claudius. The chapter explores the ways in which each figure is rewritten; it shows how these rewritings variously illustrate the complexities of a multi-faceted and divided self; and it considers the wider intentions underlying each writer’s engagement with and reconceptualization of the classical world.