Chapter 5 - ‘My Heart … with Love Did Inly Burn’

Summary

This chapter is concerned with Sulpicia’s female-authored elegies, Mary Sidney’s translations of Petrarch’s Triumph of Death, and of Robert Garnier’s Antonie, both texts which make prominent use of a female voice of desire, and Mary Wroth’s first sonnet from her Pamphilia to Amphilanthus. The argument here is not so much that Sulpicia is a model for Sidney and Wroth as an exploration, in each period, of what happens when a female author/narrator inserts herself into a discourse which is primarily gendered masculine. It analyses how previous instances of ventriloquised female voices in male authored elegy and Renaissance love poetry open up a space into which it is possible for a female author to insert herself. Of special interest is the question of what happens when the female beloved speaks up, speaks back, speaks for herself.