The article investigates Sidonie Smith’s term autobiographical manifesto, in relation to late mideaval and early modern womens’ autobiographical writing and staging of lyrical selves. By relating Smith’s theory to la querelle des femmes generally and Christine de Pizan’s Livre de la cité des dames and Louise Labés OEuvres specifically, I attempt to both show the usefulness of Smith’s theory when it comes to older materials, and to critically examine potential difficulties in bringing these two together. After a presentation of la querelle des femmes, Christine de Pizan and Louise Labé, the six aspects of the autobipgrahical manifesto and their respective uses and problems are discussed, taking as a starting point a reading of Livre de la cité des dames and OEuvres. The article concludes by arguing that the relative lack of studies focusing on early modern and medieval women’s autobiographical writing may be a result of difficulties arising when trying to aproach older material by way of postmodern theory of autobiogrpahy. The aim of this article is to give an example of how these difficulties might be ,if not overcome, made manageable.

Matilda Amundsen Bergström is a PhD student at the Department of Literature, History of ideas, and Religion, University of Gothenburg, where she works on a doctoral thesis on politics and self-representation within la querelle des femmes.