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Abstract
"Dearest Ladies" investigates literary projections of female readership in order to work toward a theory of vernacular poetics. It explores the diverse cultural meanings of women's reading in order to understand the purpose and meaning of authorial claims to write for or on behalf of women. It is interested in the influence of perceptions of omen's roles in vernacular literary culture on the history of authorial self-representation.
Chapter 1, "Boccaccio's Female Audience and the Poetics of Inclusion," reassesses Boccaccio's address to the female audience, recurrent throughout his works. Historically read as a generic marker, the claim to write for women takes on new meaning when considered in light of the broader cultural context of fourteenth-century Tuscany, wherein a burgeoning movement of vernacular writing and translation, primarily focused on devotional and religious themes, theorized the project of writing for omen as a compassionate exercise, and women's reading as socially productive. I argue that, far from an admission of estheticism, Boccaccio's feminine address is central to the author's construction of a pastoral role, as one whose writing combines "useful advice" (“utile consiglio”) and "consolation" ("consolazion").
Chapter 2, "Chaucer's Feminine Pretexts" offers new interpretations of the Chaucerian authorial persona and in turn seeks to redefine the literary status and ambitions of the author himself. Focusing on moments of auto-definition, I show that Chaucer sought to identify himself with certain genres of literature that were widely associated with female readership in the late- medieval cultural imagination: devotional writing, conduct literature, and hagiography. I argue that by casting himself as a writer of feminine genres Chaucer sought to identify himself as a writer for an emerging readership, which though lacking in literary-historical prestige was nevertheless associated with reading practices that were seen as beneficial to society.
Chapter 3, "Inquisitional Culture," investigates the effects of a climate of increasing skepticism and hostility toward female authority in the writings of Christine de Pizan. As a woman writer who addressed many of her works to prominent men of her age, Christine reverses the convention discussed in the two previous chapters. Christine's elf-fashioning as a "simple little woman" ("muliercula") is designed to facilitate her authorship of works written for a male audience, yet her authorial persona also betrays the signs of a society increasingly focused on testing the credentials of women who claimed authority.
Chapter 4, "Antagonism and Ambivalence," examines the fictional conflict Hoccleve portrayed between himself and women readers, arguing that it reflects the author's ambivalence towards the Chaucerian legacy and skepticism towards the possibility of upholding it in rapidly changing political and cultural circumstances. I argue that the anguished conflict Hoccleve presents between himself and women readers may be a product of a climate in which attitudes toward the materna lingua were increasingly complicated, even vexed, perhaps to some extent as a result of the Lollard controversy. Even as women assume ever-greater prominence as patrons and readers of vernacular literature, anxiety over women's reading intensifies as concerns over heresy pollute both the idea of the vernacular and women's reading.