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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, ....

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... the women writers of the Renaissance because they fully addressed not only the absurdity of the Petrarchan woman but also the desperation of the true Renaissance woman. 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 diffi ...