‘[I]l y a bien assez d'hommes qui escrivent, mais peu de filles se meslent à un tel exercice’ (‘There are certainly enough men who write, but very few girls involved in this type of exercise’), noted the Poitiers writer Catherine Des Roches, defending her first venture into print in 1578. On the face of it, she was right: of over 2,000 literary figures in La Croix du Maine's 1584 guide to French writers, the Bibliothèque françoise, only fifty-four are women (forty-eight active in the sixteenth century); obstructed by a lack of education, expectation, leisure, or funding, women were responsible for less than 1 per cent of editions from sixteenth-century French presses. And yet La Croix du Maine himself offers a different understanding of the female literary field: he mentions not only printed authors (eleven, including two translators) and women with pieces in miscellanies (five), but also women whose works circulated in manuscript (another way of publishing texts), and those who had works dedicated to them. Women were patrons and commissioners of all sorts of writing, the creators of literary and scientific salons, and the writers of letters. Their plays were performed, often for closed family circles, but also in public: Catherine de Parthenay's Tragédie d'Holoferne was shown in La Rochelle around 1574. They wrote (and sometimes signed) family histories on the flyleaves of family bibles; nuns in convents produced accounts and histories of their orders.