SOURCE: Robbins-Herring, Kittye Delle. “Hélisenne de Crenne: Champion of Women's Rights.” In Women Writers of the Renaissance and Reformation, edited by Katharina M. Wilson, pp. 177-218. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987.

In the following excerpt, an introduction to a translation of excerpts from de Crenne's works, Robbins-Herring contends that de Crenne is a true Renaissance feminist and that her works—which are sometimes conventional, sometimes avant-garde, and which often theorize on morality and the nature of men and women—show her to be an early advocate for women's rights.

Hélisenne de Crenne, the name that Marguerite Briet chose to use for herself as the author-heroine of Les Angoysses douloureuses qui procedent d'amours, is more than a mask to protect an aristocratic lady from scandal. Revealing as much as concealing, it is a double metaphor for her relation to her book, wherein the romanesque prénom of...