Renaissance Poetry

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, he idealized women and heterosexual love in such a way that its power would resonate into love as we see it now. Love for Petrarch was something that was ideal and perfect, held …

…response by pulling the reader into the work and making them in some ways a focal point of the pleas and questions that are being addressed. "Love" for Sidney is something that needs to be addressed and turned into a concept for women. In "Endless Torments" she exposes the ideal as a farce, a painful ideal that destroys the true woman, and in doing so she creates another way of responding to the Petrarchan ideal.