I apply concepts of translation theory, both from the earlier medieval period and from current scholarship, to specific translations for, about, and, I argue, of women. In some interpretations of the act of translation, women and copies are viewed as inferior to men and source texts. This is a view of translation that the late-medieval French translators examined below consciously or unconsciously replaced or refuted, sometimes even employing their translation as a vehicle for their argument against their source text (as in the case of Antoine Dufour's text) and asserting the auctoritas and worth of the copy (for example, the XXI Epistres d'Ovide) over the original (Ovid's Heroides). If the translators's revisions implicitly argue for the superiority of the translation over the copy, and if the copy and women are one and the same, then one might reason that, consciously or unconsciously, the translators also argue for the superiority of women over men.

In Chapter I, I provide a brief summary of medieval reading practices and medieval authorship, ultimately arguing that medieval translation's emphases on compilatio and ennarratio parallel in many ways the interpretation and adaptation of previous works performed by medieval authors.

In Chapter II, I discuss a prominent subject in late 15th-century literature: "the famous woman topos." By this period, la querelle des femmes, a debate sparked by Christine de Pizan's reading of the Roman de la Rose as an act of misogyny, was in full swing, and this debate can highlight for us the extent to which attitudes about women were being reevaluated in literary works. I examine the ways in which the translator Antoine Dufour acted as compiler of two previous works of literature, Giovanni Boccaccio's De mulieribus claris and Giacomo Filipo Foresti da Bergamo's De plurimis claris selectisque mulieribus, in presenting his translations in French about famous women. A careful examination of both the text and the images in the queen's manuscript of Les Vies des femmes celebres (Nantes, musee Dobree, ms. 17; ca. 1506) shows in different ways how the text was written for Anne and her female entourage, and how Dufour shaped his work in order to present women in a more favorable light than his source texts.

Chapter III focuses on how translators were able to manipulate literary conceptions of female virtue and vice by manipulating their Latin texts. Les XXI Epistres d'Ovide was translated into French by Octovien de Saint-Gelais ca. 1497 from Ovid's Heroides. Although dedicated to a male, King Charles VIII, many manuscript copies of this work were produced for and owned by noble women of the time. Through a careful comparison of key passages in the two versions, I show how, through interpretation and adaptation, Saint-Gelais significantly alters the Latin source, and uses his role as translator in transforming Ovid's images of women in verbal terms.

I also examine the images included in several different versions of Les XXI Epistres, and the manner in which these feminine portraits convey specific ideals of women and female readership.

Finally, Chapter IV examines how translators manipulated religious and profane depictions of women, based on a text that associates females and madness through the lens of the five senses. Jehan Drouyn's La Nef des folles, a 1498 translation, of Josse Bade's Stultiferae naves (The Ship of Female Fools), published ca. 1500, reflects a cross-cultural line of adaptation that can be traced back to Sebastian Brant's 1494 Das Narrenschiff (The Ship of Fools). As a printed text, La Nef des folles addressed a much wider audience than Les Vies des femmes celebres and the multiple manuscript versions of the XXI Epistres d'Ovide examined in Chapters II and III. The woodcuts contained in La Nef des folles also integrate and modify earlier depictions of male and female fools, most notably those from Sebastian Brant's German editions. An analysis of the images in La Nef des folles as translations of Brant's text and of its woodcuts provides further analysis of how this printed edition adapted earlier portraits of women within the realm of literature.

While the women pictured in his work were largely predicated on a misogynistic view of women as the originators and cause of all human sin, Drouyn's address to women readers furnishes the core of this project. Whether the readers of the literary works studied here would have agreed with the ways in which women were depicted within their pages is not presently at issue. Rather, the fact that these works contain depictions of women aimed directly at female readers can reveal for us the ways in which translators sought to simultaneously define and address the female sex. (Abstract shortened by UMI.).