This article will focus on the ways in which Gabrielle de Coignard’s Sonnets spirituels, cultivated in purposefully sought domestic isolation, reveals conflictual aspirations nourished by the pursuit of an untainted devotional path that nevertheless cannot escape the assimilation of the earthly passion-fraught discourse of the Petrarchan tradition. Beginning with an analysis of the two opening sonnets, I will examine how despite her apparent disavowal of the worldly obsessions of practitioners of this dominant tradition in order to define herself as a singularly and purely Christian poet, her writing places many of their conventions, allusions, and rhetoric at the centre of her own poetic itinerary. I will then move on to study how these opening signals of Coignard’s inscription of her devotional trajectory both against and within the male and female Petrarchan tradition are affirmed at multiple moments in the progression of her collection. Cet article approfondira les façons dont les Sonnets spirituels de Gabrielle de Coignard, composés dans le cadre d’une solitude domestique voulue, font preuve de fortes aspirations conflictuelles nourries par la poursuite d’un chemin dévotionnel qui n’arrive néanmoins pas à s’échapper de l’assimilation du discours des passions terrestres dans la tradition pétrarquiste. À partir d’une analyse des deux premiers sonnets, j’examinerai comment — malgré son refus apparent de ces obsessions chez Pétrarque et ses imitateurs/imitatrices français, un refus visé à se définir en tant que poétesse purement chrétienne — l’écriture de Coignard incorpore maints éléments de la rhétorique pétrarquiste au centre de son propre itinéraire poétique. J’étudierai, par la suite, comment ces signes inauguraux de l’inscription de sa trajectoire spirituelle à l’intérieur et à l’encontre du discours pétrarquiste sont affirmés à de multiples moments dans la progression de son recueil.

Researchers should cite this work as follows:

• Baker, D. L., (2025), "Gabrielle de Coignard’s Sonnets spirituels: Writing Passion within and against the Petrarchan Tradition", HSSCommons: (DOI: )

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1. Renaissance and Reformation

Original publication: Baker, Deborah Lesko. "Gabrielle de Coignard’s Sonnets spirituels: Writing Passion within and against the Petrarchan Tradition." Renaissance and Reformation 38 (3): 2015. 41-60. DOI: 10.33137/rr.v38i3.26147. This material has been re-published in an unmodified form on the Canadian HSS Commons with the permission of Iter Canada / Renaissance and Reformation. Copyright © the author(s). Their work is distributed by Renaissance and Reformation under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. For details, see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/.