| Summary: | Jane Anger’s Protection for Women (1589), the first defence in English written by a female authorial persona, is part of the controversy known as the Querelle des femmes. As such, it posits an opponent whose arguments are rebutted. In this paper, this opponent, whose identity remains uncertain, is considered to be John Lyly in his Cooling Card for Philautus (1578). Both texts are analyzed through the bestiaries they build to define both female nature and male nature. In a first part, it analyzes the philosophical stakes of these animal similes. In a second part, it discusses Lyly’s defence of the gender order based on his positioning of the female sex at the boundary between the human group and the animal group. Finally, it shows how Anger retorted by demonstrating that misogyny and misogamy were taking men straight back to bestiality.
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