One of the most fraught endeavors of literary analysis is the attempt to suss out the gender of an anonymous or pseudonymous author. Everything we assume, believe, and project about gendered writing gets applied in ways that cannot help but confirm our biases, absent a "reveal" from the living author, or from previously unknown evidence. (A notorious example from the world of science fiction and fantasy is when author Robert Silverberg published the opinion that pseudonymous author James Tiptree must be a man, because the writing style was "ineluctably masculine", only to have Alice B. Sheldon revealed as the author behind the name.)
When examining texts of the early modern period, there are the competing dynamics that men were far more likely to gain publication than women, but on the other hand, women were under much higher pressure to publish in a form that concealed their identity. To what extent can the quest for author identity rely on gender clues in the subject matter or point of view? Is it reasonable to conclude that a polemic attacking misogyny stands a better than average chance of having been written by a woman? And does that matter in how we interpret the content of the text, apart of questions of the social history of authorship?
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