Like their counterparts elsewhere in early modern Europe, Spanish and Portuguese women poets redirected Petrarchan conventions in order to critique gender inequities and to discard the mute, passive role assigned to women on and off the page. Three seventeenth-century poets who boldly redirect courtly love in poems addressed to women are Marcia Belisarda, Catalina Clara Ramírez de Guzmán, and Sor Violante del Cielo/do Ceu. Just as strictly delineated vestimentary codes allowed some venturing women to don male disguise for broader horizons or access to a wage economy, so the structures and conventions of Petrarchan verse allowed for startling gender play by women lyricists.

Belisarda, Ramírez, and Sor Violante (like the better-known María de Zayas y Sotomayor and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz) on the surface adopt Petrarchan and courtly love traditions, while at the same time they incisively rewrite those conventions. Critical views hewing to binary considerations of genre, and implicitly to “either-or” definitions of sexuality, seek to identify these poems as utterances couched in the discourse either of friendship or of passionate love. Our times seem notably uneasy when confronted with these amorous poems of women to other women. Nevertheless, the lexical, figural, and discursive conventions of the poems themselves raise the topic of lesbianism, or whatever eroticized love between women may without anachronism be termed. Terms suggested by critics and historians, drawn variously from period texts and present-day usage, include “same-sex love and desire between women” (Canadé Sautman and Sheingorn), the “silent sin” (Alain Saint-Saëns), “sapphism” (Susan Lanser), female homoeroticism, “lesbianlike” textual presence (Judith Bennett), or queer desire.

Is “lesbianism” (by any terminology) anachronistic for the seventeenth century, as has been suggested of Sor Violante's poems and those of her better-known coeval, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz? Social constructionist views tended in the 1980s and 90s to locate the formation of homo- (or hetero-) sexual “identities” in the eighteenth or nineteenth century, and thus to deny or elide the investigation of same-sex desire and eroticism in earlier periods. This haste to rule out “sex before sexuality” (Canadé Sautman and Sheingorn 6) works to shut down inquiry into the erotic power of women's poetry to women and into the self-replicating critical paradigms (including those of some feminist criticism) that reinforce patriarchal and “heteronormative” views.