"Gender, Rhetoric, and Print Culture in French Renaissance Writing" by Floyd Gray

In this book Floyd Gray explores how the treatment of controversial subjects in French Renaissance writing was affected both by rhetorical conventions and by the commercial requirements of an expanding publishing industry.




Focusing on a wide range of discourses on gender issues - misogynist, feminist, autobiographical, homosexual and medical - Gray reveals the extent to which these marginalized texts reflect literary concerns rather than social reality. His new readings of Rabelais, Montaigne, Louise Labe and others, challenge the inherent anachronism of criticism that fails to take account of the cultural context of the period.

Contents
Introduction
1 Discourses of misogyny
The rule of rhetoric
The Querelle des femmes: rhetoric or reality?
Antifeminismand marriage in Rabelais's Tiers Livre
2 Irony and the sexual other
Jeanne Flore and erotic desire: feminismor male fantasy?
Reading and writing in the tenth story of the Heptaméron
3 Anonymity and the poetics of regendering
The "I" as another
Pernette du Guillet's Platonism
Louise Labé's Petrarchism
4 The women in Montaigne's life
Montaigne's women
Marie de Gournay's Montaigne
5 Sexual marginality
Reading homosexuality
Cross-dressing
The androgyne myth
Brantôme, medical discourse, and the makings of pornography
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index