SOURCE: Nash, Jerry. “‘Exerçant oeuvres viriles’: Feminine Anger and Feminist (Re)Writing in Hélisenne de Crenne.” L'Esprit Créateur 30, no. 4 (winter 1990): 38-48.

In the following essay, Nash shows how in her letters de Crenne uses anger to offer a feminist critique and to revise and rewrite literary, cultural, and intellectual history.

The claim has often been made that women in early modern literature, both those writing it and those being written about or depicted in it, have very seldom explored the subject of “women by women,” a seemingly modern subject of inquiry and revisionary writing so central to the feminist movement as we know it today.¹ I wish to offer here discussion of a clearly notable exception in the Renaissance, the case of Hélisenne de Crenne as female author and central female character as both acquire meaning in her Epistres familieres et invectives of 1539.² In...