Sociability and Poetic Projection: Women’s Voices in Baroque Poetry Contests

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to show a tradition of feminine poetry that has survived throughout the centuries, focusing on the greatest period of splendor, the Baroque era. Our goal is to shed light on this space for literary creation from the perspective of the dissemination of some of the first printed works attributed to women in the history of our literature, which were written in Catalan, Castilian and Latin. To do this, after having carried out an exhaustive search on the universe of the contests of the 16th-17th centuries and systematising this production, we offer some sociological and literary observations related to the social origin of women authors, and the role and motivations of female participation.