Abstract
The humanist Luisa Sigea represents a case of an exceptional learned woman of the Spanish Renaissance seeking to perform in a nonreligious milieu. In her vernacular poems “Un fin, una esperanza, un como, un cuando” y “Pasados tengo hasta ahora”, Sigea revises the traditional trajectory of the Petrarchean poetic subject in order to replace the elusive woman, viewed as a passive object of the male gaze and ultimately responsible for his spiritual perfection, into a female subject able to articulate her own poetic voice, a voice impregnated by melancholy and sorrow. In these poems the author challenges the Aristotelian concept of melancholy as a sign of only male artistic genius, by employing the concept in the construction of a female subject that ought to be perceived as special. This use of melancholy coincides with her personal frustration with the lack of professional opportunities open to a female humanist in the Spanish courts of the Renaissance. As we can observe in these poems, as well as in Sigea's other contributions to the most representative genres of the Humanist prose, her epistles and her dialogue Duarum virginum, melancholy combines with a defense of the solitude of the contemplative life, to suggest that isolation and voluntary marginalization were the only avenues available at that time for a lay woman to achieve intellectual growth and spiritual perfection.
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Góngora, M.M. Poesía, Melancolía Y Subjetividad Femenina: La Humanista Luisa Sigea. Neophilologus 90, 423–443 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11061-006-0006-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11061-006-0006-9