El canto de la décima musa

During the Renaissance and Baroque, the literary genre most cultivated by women was poetry. In the classical Greco-Roman world that then operated as an ideal referent in the whole cultural field, the antecedent of a poet, Sappho of Lesbos, was generally invoked, considered since Plato as "the tenth Muse". From Safo the poets of the time claimed themselves heirs, with the approval of their contemporaries; the epithet "tenth muse" came to function as a true advertising resource in the printed dissemination of his works. This anthology does nothing but pay tribute to an old and important public facet of women, offering a representative and contextualized corpus of the poetic work of the most celebrated authors in the West during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, at the dawn of what is today known as the literary profession.