I. Introduction Louise Labe's 1555 (Euvres appeared with a substantial appendix: a collection of twenty-four poems in her praise, authored by male contemporaries. This collection, entitled Escriz de divers poetes, a la louenge de Louize Labe Lionnoize, has received relatively little critical attention to date, yet offers an invaluable glimpse into world in which Labe published. (1) The Escriz both document and seek to shape reception of CEuvres. Not only do they bear witness to how skillfully Labe marketed her book and how poets of her circle participated in creation of her poetic persona, but they also reveal complex modes in which Labe's contemporaries responded to her as a poet. The Escriz include two works, an ode by Olivier de Magny anda sonnet by Claude de Taillemont, that explicitly liken Labe to Medusa. The critic Mireille Huchon has recently argued that these assimilations of Labe to Medusa are attempts to belittle woman writer who is ostensibly being praised. She further notes that Medusa poems exemplify a general trend in Escriz whereby Labe is praised for her erotic traits rather than for her literary skill. Huchon reaches a dramatic conclusion with regard to Medusa poems and representation of Labe as femme rather than poetesse, claiming that Labe did not write texts attributed to her, and that Escriz are an exercise in mockery by men well aware of this fact. (2) The view that connotations of Medusa image are purely negative is one that Freud also posits in his famous essay Head, where he underscores Medusa's power to induce horror in male viewer and states that head isolates the horrifying effects of female genitalia from their pleasure-giving ones. (3) Nevertheless, Freud's assertion would have come as a surprise to sixteenth-century readers, who were accustomed to an eroticized Medusa, a figure so prevalent in French and Italian love poetry that she had become a cliche of genre. Following Petrarch's celebrated depiction of Laura as Medusa in Rime sparse, Gorgon is found in works of Bembo and Sannazaro, Sceve and Lyonnais poets, and Ronsard and other members of Pleiade. Joachim D u Bellay's 1553 poem Contre les Petrarquistes includes Medusa in its witty catalogue of tired Petrarchan formulae overused to describe beloved: gazing into lady's eyes is said to be equivalent of meeting Meduze face to face. (4) Thus Medusa trope, if ambivalent in its import, is neither as unusual nor as obviously derogatory as Huchon suggests. The Petrarchan Medusa, used by male authors to designate object of desire, nonetheless seems to have little in common with one representation of Gorgon famous today: that of Medusa as woman writer. (5) The question remains as to why Magny and Taillemont, like other authors of Escriz, should choose to emphasize Labe's beauty rather than her esprit. Of twenty-four poems, only ten make mention of her music or writing, whereas all refer to her beauty, and/or associate her with love. Huchon interprets this omission literally: if Labe is praised for her beauty and not her poetry, it is because she is only a courtesan and not a poet. However, historically atypical position that Labe occupied as a published woman poet suggests other reasons for her colleagues' decision to address her in erotic language. Nearly every aspiring poet of age addressed verse to a female beloved; as Huchon herself remarks, Le poete, ences annees-la, est ... le poete d'une femme. (6) Yet these poems in praise of women were composed within a framework of male literary sociability; each writer sought to construct his own literary voice through a pattern of address to male colleagues. In case of tributes to Labe, a woman who has stepped into a male poetic exchange, two potential modes of address, to woman and to writer, converge. …