Beginning of Essay
Renaissance ideas of women were strongly shaped by the writers of the time and by the conceptions of femininity that had existed since the Middle Ages. No one more strongly affected the early Renaissance idea of what a woman was than Petrarch, he idealized women ....

Middle of Essay
.... Writers like Mary Sidney refuted the ideal of Petrarch and retold it to reflect the true suffering that the real woman of the Renaissance was faced with, a life that was weighted down with the chains of an abusive patriarchal society. The difficulty that female writers faced cannot be understated. As Wendy Wall states, "When women wrote, privately or publicly, they had to confront forms and figures that alienated them from the position of speaking subject." This difficulty was perhaps the most profound in terms of their ability to set up a counter idea to the Petrarchan ideal woman. Silencing them ensured that males could define what it meant ....