French Renaissance women writers in search of community: Literary constructions of female companionship in city, family and convent. Louise Labe, Lionnoize; Madeleine and Catherine des Roches, Mere et Fille; Anne de Marquets, Soeur de Poissy

Within the published works of French women writers of the sixteenth century one may observe a highly self-conscious recruitment and/or recognition of female, literary companionship. Unlike their male counterparts who benefited from university liaisons and discipleships and whose call to learning was universally condoned, these women needed to forge an identity and a sense of legitimation that would afford them defense and encouragement in the face of their potentially scandalous enterprise.;This dissertation examines three different women's communities, each illustrated by a representative author or authors: Louise Labe and her community of regional contemporaries, the "Dames Lionnoises"; Madeleine and Catherine des Roches, a mother and daughter, whose close family ties provide their privileged community; and finally, Anne de Marquets, a nun at the convent of Poissy whose public persona was strongly linked to the sisterhood of her religious order. Each woman's appeal to her group identity requires specific, literary strategies. These will be analyzed initially within their prefatory addresses--epistles to the reader, to each other or to a broader group of women--and then further developed within the body of their works.;Labe, the most secular, lyric and independent of the women studied, capitalizes on the established reputation of learned Lyonnaise women and illustrates her preface's call to glory and pleasure in various transformations of classical, conventional women's communities. The Des Roches' liminal agenda represents a prolific mother-daughter exchange throughout their three publications that proposes a carefully constructed learned domesticity. My concluding chapter studies the work of Anne de Marquets, doubly bound by religious vows of silence and general, societal injunction, who defends herself (and is upheld) with various appeals to the sanctity and necessity of her publication--all nurtured within the communal spirit of the convent.;All of these women, whether choosing to identify themselves as compatriots, mothers, daughters or Sisters, used the conventional, literary means at their disposal to inscribe themselves into a public (i.e., published) domain at times hostile to their endeavor. At the hands of the very traditions used to silence and objectify them, Renaissance women authors reworked their medium to support and sustain their call to writing.