RENAISSANCE writers have plenty to say about women and romance, most of it disparaging –on both sides of the equation. On the one hand, romance itself tends to be identified with the feminine. The leisured experience of reading chivalric literature is metaphorically equated with the bewitching snares and diversions that are forever threatening to seduce the heroes of these books from their assigned quests, displacing them from the category of the ‘knight errant’ into that of the merely ‘errant’. Books of chivalry thus might themselves figure as tempting Acrasias or Lyndarazas, invitations to surrender oneself to present pleasure at the expense of one's virtue. Time and again, we are warned of the propensity of such books to induce lustful thoughts. For François de la Noue, texts such as Amadis de Gaule are virtual handbooks of sexual misadventure, as alluring as they are dangerous, full of ‘impudent and foule loves’. This is the process that Patricia Parker describes, whereby romance ‘became increasingly synonymous with one of its own archetypes –the protective but potentially indolent bower’.

Beyond this, we also have a large amount of commentary on the topic of women themselves reading romance, again almost invariably dismissive. Despite the gendering of the genre as female, the (presumed) danger seems, if anything, to have been amplified in the case of the lady reader. Again and again we are reminded of the threat to female virtue that such a figure represents.