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The Gendering of the Lute in Sixteenth-Century French Love Poetry*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Carla Zecher
Carla Zecher*
Affiliation:
The Newberry Library
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Extract

Blame not my lute for he must sound Of this or that as liketh me.

Sir Thomas Wyatt

Lute-poems came into vogue in France in the 1540s and 1550s. Because of the lute's shape, it could be gendered either as masculine or feminine; male and female poets therefore made use of lute imagery in different ways. Their references to the lute are informed by the gendered culture surrounding the instrument in this period and by the etiquette and technicalities of lute playing. Even more than painters and engravers, poets could invest the lute with human qualities, conflating it with bodies and body parts. It could thus be adapted to serve a variety of amorous scenarios.

Type
Studies
Information
Renaissance Quarterly , Volume 53 , Issue 3 , Autumn 2000 , pp. 769 - 791
Copyright
Copyright © Renaissance Society of America 2000

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Footnotes

*

This article is a revision of a paper presented at the annual meeting of the Renaissance Society of America held in Vancouver in April 1997. I am grateful to Jeanice Brooks, Robert Cottrell, Colin Eisler, and Claire Fontijn for their helpful comments on earlier drafts.

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