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This chapter considers how feminism and male-male love can operate in tension. Same-sex male sexuality was sometimes perceived as misogynistic in pro-woman arguments in the early-modern debate over the nature and status of women. As a key case study in this cultural tension, the center of this chapter is a reading of Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptameron, a feminist collection of tales heavily inflected with Neoplatonism. To prepare for a reading of this text, the mid-century French context of the reception of Plato is discussed. A close-reading of the Heptameron reveals that intimacy between men has to be fractured in order to create a version of heterosexuality that can subsequently lead to pro-woman ends. In a number of cases, male-male intimacy is transformed into what might be termed heterosexuality. The text, however, sends a specific message about the nature of male-male love, as the narrative corresponds to techniques of rewriting Plato seen in contemporaneous French translations of Plato, especially the Symposium version by Louis Le Roy. Male-male love, then, is evoked but then visibly written out in Marguerite de Navarre in ways that the French translations use to transform the eroticism in Plato’s text.

Humanists routinely claimed that written words could extend a writer’s life posthumously. But the claim was accompanied by widespread anxiety that this potential would not be realized. This section explores how tenses helped to disentangle the living written word from what was constructed as dead context. First, the focus is on ancient authors: Renaissance histories of ancient philosophy and poetry (Louis Le Roy) are examined, as are paratexts of humanist editions of ancient works, and paratextual biography, in particular the genre of the Life (Vita). Secondly, the focus is on more recent authors (‘moderns’) who had lived in the late Middle Ages or the Renaissance. The role of tense in lending posthumous presence to the authors’ written words is explored through the genres of the Life and the eulogy (elogium)—as practised by Scévole de Sainte-Marthe and others— through the literary history provided by Étienne Pasquier, and through the posterity-orientated poetry of living writers themselves.

Following the analysis of how tenses helped imbue the deceased’s actions with posthumous presence, this section explores how tenses did the same for the words that the deceased had actually or allegedly spoken while alive. The focus is on the representation of dead orators, both from classical antiquity and from more recent times (in the parlements of France). The tenses with which Du Vair describes both groups tend paradoxically to attribute greater posthumous presence to the more temporally remote group (the ancient orators). Others attributed a stronger posthumous presence to the oratory of recently deceased parlementaires. And, in the paratexts of humanist editions and translations of ancient orators, tenses created an oscillation between (what humanism construed as) present object and absent context, with the once-spoken words sometimes ‘breaking through’ from their originary context into the present.