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This chapter examines the trajectory of some Portuguese women who belonged to court life in the 16th and 17th centuries, and reflects on the way they chose to enter into literature. The prefaces to their translations and works written in Latin, but presented as citations and translations, reveal they felt connected to the canonic literature they studied and that this shaped their work. When studying translation, we find women revealing their auctoritas inter pares, participating in the public debates of their own time without losing the feminine qualities required of them by society.