From Mother and Daughter

Among the best-known and most prolific French women writers of the sixteenth century, Madeleine (1520–87) and Catherine (1542–87) des Roches were celebrated not only for their uncommonly strong mother-daughter bond but also for their bold assertion of poetic authority for women in the realm of belles lettres . The Dames des Roches excelled in a variety of genres, including poetry, Latin and Italian translations, correspondence, prose dialogues, pastoral drama, and tragicomedy; collected in From