The Currency of Eros: Women's Love Lyric in Europe, 1540-1620

• Published in: Sidney journal (Guelph) 1990, Vol.11 (1), p.59
• Main Author: Shaver, Anne
• Format: Review
• Language: English
• ISSN: 1480-0926

Comparable to present-day guardians of an ideal perceived to be vanishing beyond recall - members of the N.A.S., for example, or the anti-Choice movement - men and women of early modern Europe sought to turn back the tide of inevitable change in a number of ways. There had been some women troubadour poets, but their tongue, old Provençal, was not as current as classical Greek and Latin were. Because she wrote to women, Sappho, the best-known woman poet among the ancients, did not model a radical shift in language; when Greek or Roman male poets wrote love poetry to men they also used the same vocabulary as those who wrote to women, since in either case their subject was the pursuit of a reluctant beloved. Both use the language of male-authored conduct books and invoke acceptable modes of female behavior; with this Whitney combines "the familiar letter, moral maxims, and the female-voiced lament of Ovid's Heroldes," while Catherine avails herself of fashionable neoplatonism to create from its presentation of the ideal woman an image of the ideal couple. Louise Labé, empowered by her father's and husband's financial success and social ambitions, and Veronica Franco, behaving as was expected of a well-educated Venetian courtesan, use male literary modes to claim equal rights in love.