SOURCE: Nash, Jerry C. “Constructing Hélisenne de Crenne: Reception and Identity.” In “Por le soie amisté”: Essays in Honor of Norris J. Lacy, edited by Keith Busby and Catherine M. Jones, pp. 371-83. Amsterdam, Netherlands: Rodopi, 2000.

In the following essay, Nash asserts that misreadings of de Crenne's Epistres by her contemporaries as well as modern scholars have generated misperceptions about her identity.

It would be of no small interest to discover what early modern readers really thought of Hélisenne de Crenne's Epistres familieres et invectives, and, in particular, of this early modern author's concern for questions of female literary autonomy and identity, that is, of gender and power. That there was tremendous readerly interest in these Letters cannot be disputed, for this work enjoyed six printings in a span of only twenty years between the first edition of 1539 and the last one in the Renaissance in...