Women of the French Renaissance in Search of Literary Community:

A Prolegomenon to Early Modern Women’s Participation in Letters

 

Kirk D. Read

Bates College

 

It is now over fifteen years since Joan Kelly’s monumental query concerning the plight of Early Modern European women’s experience of the Renaissance. Though her essay “Did women have a Renaissance?” has not enjoyed consistently laudatory reception, it is undeniable that her question has provoked rich discussion among current literary historians. The seemingly endless permutations of her title pay perpetual homage, if not to all the particulars of her research, at least to its pioneering spirit of investigation of gender in the Renaissance. “Did women have a Revolution?” “. . . an Enlightenment?” . . . “Did men . . .?,” “Did madness . . .?”, and so on.1[1] Barbara Kiefer Lewalski’s article on women as readers in the Renaissance displays most clearly the indebtedness to the ensuing discussion of gender as a lens for historical investigation provoked by Kelly:

 

Thanks to a decade or so of feminist and cultural studies focussed on gender and the social construction of identity, we now know a good deal about how early modern society constructed women within several discourses—law, medicine, theology, courtiership, domestic advice. (Kiefer Lewalski 792)

 

Literary historians have also, thanks to these new fields of inquiry, been led to examine how women of letters themselves managed to construct their own discourses in order to establish a public, intellectual life within a society often hostile to their aspirations.

Kelly presents a bleak assessment of women’s participation in Early Modern European culture. In her analysis, women were ignored or worse, victimized by societal advances of the period. She posited that

 

1[1]See in particular Carol Thomas Neely, “Recent Work in Renaissance Studies: Psychology, Did Madness Have a Renaissance?”, and Judith Brown’s 1987 review of Kelly’s collection Women, History and Theory: The Essays of Joan Kelly, and David Herlihy’s article “Did Women Have a Renaissance? A Reconsideration.”

events that further the historical development of men, liberating them from natural, social, or ideological constraints, have quite different, even opposite, effects upon women . . . Women as a group . . . experienced a contraction of social and personal options that men of their classes . . . did not. (19–20)

 

Kelly answered her titular question with a resounding “No.” That I shall suggest in this paper a contrary assessment is not to refute out of hand Kelly’s facts nor all of her assumptions, but to offer a renewed appreciation of women’s participation in at least the literary aspect of sixteenth-century French society. Women wrote. Women circulated manuscripts. Women argued in literary salons that they themselves organized and directed. Women learned, wrote and taught Latin. Women ran publishing houses upon the death of their spouses. Women published their own writing under their own names.

Though New Historians of the last two decades have uncovered ample, compelling evidence—perhaps more compelling than Kelly’s—to illustrate the difficult conditions of public women’s lives, they have brought to light at the same time women’s literary traces that suggest a somewhat more hopeful story. The first step in Elaine Showalter’s gynocritical paradigm, the resuscitation of women’s texts, has been well served in this regard.2[2] Though editions are slow to appear, written works and anecdotal support are surfacing from the archives. Evelyne Berriot-Salvadore’s Les Femmes dans la société française de la Renaissance is invaluable in this regard, given its broad-ranging investigation of women in a multitude of milieux and discourses and its expansive bibliography. Thus, to believe that all the proscriptive doctrines regarding women’s public behavior—of which speech was perhaps the most transgressive—were heeded is, I would suggest, to mistake some men’s wishful thinking (and indeed, much resultant feminist theorizing) for universal reality.3[3] As comparativist Ann Rosalind Jones and Natalie Zemon Davis among others have encouraged, we must be attentive to the ways in which women

2[2]See Elaine Showalter, “Towards a Feminist Poetics.”

3[3]Indeed, there is an abundance of historical evidence to indicate that women often endured great hardship and prejudice in public endeavors for reasons based strictly upon their sex. Conduct books such as those penned by the humanist Juan Luis Vives betray a ceaseless paranoia with women’s speech, thought and social interaction. In The Education of a Christian Woman, Vives warns: “I pray thee, understand thine own goodness maid, . . . if thou shut up both body and mind, and seal them with those seals that none can open” (14). Body, mind and mouth, it would appear, for publication, the public rendering of one’s creative thoughts and insights was a highly suspect activity for women to be undertaking. See also Foster Watson, Vives and the Renascence Education of Women.

employed invention and effort, to their tactics of subversion and reappropriation.4[4] In her essay from the collection The Ideology of Conduct, Jones asserts that

 

(b)y necessity, women writers acted out propitiatory obedience to expectations of women in order to defend themselves against attacks for making public their still unusual and suspect ambition to contribute to a culture still produced almost entirely by men. (40)

 

Here and elsewhere, Jones points to textual ways in which women manoeuvered within literary conventions to comply with and at the same time subvert societal mandates for their behavior.

With this illuminating scholarship in mind, I suggest a step further, to see beyond text to context. In addition to uncovering the textual tinkering, or bricolage as Jones terms it, we must form some view of how women addressed the external conditions of their lives in order to find the freedom and the leisure to indeed think about literary conventions in the first place. If studies such as Jones’s lead us to important realizations about literary subversion in the service of women’s writing, I propose to use similar textual strategies to reveal evidence which pertains to women’s lives. It is my assertion that women carefully wove their texts not only to protect or promote their works, but to project a sense of community as well which was equally important to their literary livelihood. This paper seeks to search behind the veil of Jones’s “propitiatory obedience.” As textual evidence will show, literary women, while demurring to concerns regarding their publication, manoeuvered as well to present themselves and their works as appealing and belonging to a specific female community. Just as Christine de Pizan’s City of Ladies a century and a half before was built to protect her sisters, “abandonnées, sans défense, comme un champs sans haie” (42), so did women take part in such a constructive, literary enterprise in search of communal, feminine identity and legitimation.

What is immediately striking about women’s published writings in the French Renaissance is the continual address to other women within the dedicatory and prefatory locus of their works. Almost without exception their collections begin with epistles dedicated “aux dames,” “aux lectrices,” “à toutes vertueuses femmes,” or with letters which hailed certain patronesses or female friends. Using specific examples of French Renaissance women writers, I will discern three distinct female communities located within regional, familial, and religious contexts which played an important role in the enabling and in the legitimation of these women’s works and lives.5[5]

4[4]One might remember here the groundbreaking work in this area which is still instructive for contemporary discussion, i.e. Natalie Zemon Davis’s “City Women and Religious Change” and several essays by Jones, “Assimilation with a Difference: Renaissance Women Poets and Literary Influence” and “Nets and Bridles: Early Modern Conduct Books and Sixteenth-Century Women’s Lyrics.”

5[5]Margaret L. King’s book, Women of the Renaissance, divides her pan-European study in a similar way: Women in the Family, Women and the Church, Women and High Culture; fittingly,

 

* * *

 

Regional pride, summoned as a tactic of self-promotion, was commonly invoked by male poets of the French Renaissance. The Pleiade poets’ works make constant reference to cherished ancestral roots which lend quasi-mythological importance to their writings. One need not scan much further than the title pages to learn of Ronsard’s attachment to the Vendôme and the Loir river, or of Du Bellay’s to the inspirational Loire. Women too used their provenance as an avenue for recognition, witness Marie de Romieu’s repeated designation as the “Vivaroise” and Madeleine and Catherine des Roches’s constant rejoinder, “de Poitiers.” Perhaps the most rigorously and consciously cultivated female regional community, however, is expressed in the works of Pernette du Guillet and Louise Labé of Lyons.

Pernette du Guillet’s Rymes predate Louise Labé’s Oeuvres by ten years and can in many ways be seen as laying the foundation of praise for Lyonnais women writers’ community. In this posthumously published collection, Antoine du Moulin describes the glory of Pernette du Guillet as linked to her city’s heritage. The preface, “Antoine du Moulin aux Dames Lyonnoizes,” appeals to Lyons’s reputation as a thriving center of culture and trade (both intellectual and mercantile) and makes a rare pitch for equal opportunity in letters:

 

que la memoire de vous puisse testifier à la Posterité de la docilité et vivacité des bons espritz, qu’en tous artz ce Climat Lyonnois a tousjours produict en tous sexes, voire assez plus copieusement, que guere autre. (3, emphasis mine)

 

More than simple praise, Du Moulin’s preface serves as incitement of other like-minded Lyonnais women to join in what he envisions as a tradition of Letters.

 

les Cieux nous enviantz tel heur la nous ravirent, ô Dames Lyonnoises, pour vous laisser achever ce qu’elle avoit si heureusement commencé: c’est à sçavoir de vous exerciter, comme elle . . . [que] vous la puissiez si glorieusement ensuyvre. (4)

 

It is in response to this command, I would suggest, that Louise Labé establishes herself as a woman writer worthy of publication de son vivant ten years later. Encouraged, perhaps, by the fortuitous, alliterative qualities of her name, Louise Labé Lyonnoise finds ample opportunity throughout her Oeuvres to associate herself with her notable, urban heritage. The “Dames Lyonnaises” of Antoine du Moulin become a topos continuously referred to throughout the 1555 Oeuvres.

Catherine Stimpson’s introduction invokes the Kelly legacy as well (ix–xi).

In Louise Labé’s dedicatory epistle “A Mademoiselle Clémence de Bourges, Lyonnaise,” her girlhood companion is exalted in much the same manner as Pernette du Guillet’s contemporaries, as she hopes to

 

vous inciter et faire venir envie en voyant ce mien euvre rude et mal bati, d’en mettre en lumiere un autre qui soit mieux limé et de meilleure grace. (20)

 

Moving from “paratext” to “text,” we find several direct references to these women which sustain this prospective Lyonnais female tradition. In the first elegy, Labé pleads “Dames, qui les lirez, / De mes regrets avec moy soupirez.” If there is any doubt as to the identity of these “Dames,” it is dispelled in the third elegy’s plea: “Quand vous lirez, ô Dames Lionnoises, / Ces miens escrits pleins d’amoureuses noises.” Further on in this same poem, Labé names herself within this group as she passes the narrative voice to Amour who says to her: “Tu penses donq, ô Lionnoise Dame, / Pouvoir fuir par ce moyen ma flame,” paralleling the vocative emphasis of her opening line. The frame of explicit references to the women is completed, logically, in the final lines of her poetry: “Ne reprenez, Dames, si j’ay aymé: / Si j’ay senti mile torches ardentes.”

These direct invocations of the putative reader, and, I attest, of the potential, literary community of Lyonnais women are enhanced by other, more subtle allusions which complement her agenda. Most intriguing is the characterization of her love and of her poetry which she describes in Elegy I. Apollo, friend to the Muses, finally inspires Labé to write. “Chanter me fait,” she sings of the god,

 

non les bruians tonnerres

De Jupiter, ou les cruelles guerres,

Dont trouble Mars, quand il veut, l’Univers.

Il m’a donné la lyre, qui les vers

Souloit chanter de l’Amour Lesbienne.

Et à ce coup pleurera de la mienne. (lines 11–16)

 

This reference to the poet and most specifically to the site, of a powerful, women’s poetic community is telling. The newly rediscovered matriarch of Lesbos serves well this contemporary

desire for female literary companionship. Exclusively female, literary, passionate and protected, the sorority of Sappho provides intriguing material for comparison and identification.6[6]

Equally telling is the transformation of the Diana and Actaeon myth enacted in sonnet XIX. Posing at first as the beleaguered male hunter, “J’allois resvant comme fay maintefois, / Sans y penser” (compare Ovid’s Actaeon, “wandering, far from certain”), Labé then “metamor-phoses” the myth itself, inscribing herself not as a threat to the nymphs attending to Diana, but as an adherent. The narrator’s greeter calls out “Nynfe estonnee, / Que ne t’es tu vers Diane tournee? . . . Qu’as tu trouvé, o compagne, en ta voye?” (lines 6–9). In like manner do we witness Louise Labé and Antoine du Moulin in their respective epistles calling the “dames Lyonnaises” into the fold, into a community of women writers, listeners, supporters. The hunt is a particularly fitting metaphor for the oppression so forcefully remarked in Joan Kelly’s pioneering essay; Labé’s transformation of this myth to speak of women’s inclusion and survival is, however, indicative of engagement, both literary and social, which works to more optimistic ends. The set-upon nymph is nurtured, incorporated and given a forum for her grief which is, ultimately, the narrator’s lyric lament.

Evidence of the realization of Labé’s dream of a Lyonnais women’s community is as illusive and uncertain as the individual biographies of the city’s dames savantes. Compendium sources such as Lacroix du Maine, Du Verdier, De Billon, Laporte and De Coste, however, testify to the existence of a number of women taking part publicly in the literary life of their city. It appears significant for our argument, that Billon’s Le fort inexpugnable de l’honneur du sexe feminin begins the chapter which enumerates the learned ladies of the present (“La Grosse Tour d’Invention, et Composition des Femmes”) with “la noble Vile de Lyon.”7[7] Of the école lyonnaise lineage, one must certainly recognize Pernette du Guillet as well as Jeanne, Claudine and Sibylle Scève, purported sisters who were close relatives of Du Guillet’s destinataire, Maurice Scève. (The exact kinship of these three women is sketchy at best: sources as recent as Pérouse and Berriot-Salvadore remain conflicted and imprecise.) Another contemporary, Marguerite Du Bourg, is said to have been well-educated in all of the liberal arts, encouraging her daughters, Claude and Marguerite, in intellectual pursuits, particularly mathematics. Jeanne Gaillarde, Claude Peronne and Anne Tulonne are Lyonnais exemplars who receive mention in Billon, the latter for “la perfection de ses Myssives plus que Ciceroniannes” (36).8[8] Louise Labé’s dedicatee, Clémence de Bourges, is consistently cited as highly cultivated in letters, if unpublished. Finally, Marie de Pierre-Vive, before becoming a court favorite to Catherine de

6[6]For a thorough study of the rediscovery of Sappho in the sixteenth century, see François Rigolot’s “Louise Labé et la Redécouverte de Sappho.”

7[7]Billon claims that his plan is to “suyvre l’ordre commencé de la Decoration de la Republique Françoise, ou elles florissent pour sa reputation, comme Region de tout le monde, la ou Dame Science ose pour le jourdhuy plus seurement poser ses piedz fugitiz, quoy qu’en dye quelque autre nation, ou ja les bons Paintres luy ont fait des ayles aux piedz, aussi bien qu’a Vertu sa maitresse” (35).

8[8]See also Marie-Madeleine Fontaine, “‘Un Coeur Mis en Gage’: Pontus de Tyard, Marguerite de Bourg et le Milieu Lyonnais Des Années 1550.”

Médicis, made of her home in Lyons a “temple de la science et de l’esprit,” entertaining such luminaries as Marot, Dolet, Scève and Des Périers during the 1530s.9[9]

The extent to which Louise Labé called out to this tradition of learned women in Lyons already involved in writing—either as authors (Du Guillet), readers (De Bourges) or facilitators (De Pierre-Vive)—cannot be known. It is my thesis, however that these women and their influence were not unknown to Labé and that they cannot be ignored. I appear decidedly more optimistic in this way than Evelyne Berriot-Salvadore who answers the question at hand, “Qui seraient donc, ces `Dames Lyonnaises’ capables de recevoir la leçon de la Belle Cordière?,” with the assertion that, of those women known to us through documentation, she could only have known Claudine and Sibylle Scève and Clémence de Bourges (448). Berriot-Salvadore is looking, however, for a “réelle émancipation des bourgeoises lyonnaises.” Certainly, no new, imaginary Orders of Lesbos were chartered with Louise Labé as their Sappho and her dedication to Clémence de Bourges (“Estant le tems venu!”) as their manifesto. Such expectations appear futile. The literary construction of community, however, seen in the context of Antoine Du Moulin’s preface to Du Guillet’s Rymes and given the realities of learned women’s reputation in Lyons, is not negligible. As at least a textual haven for Labé’s literary project, the dames lyonnoises as a communal, female referant, informed a strategy of self-presentation and legitimation which was vitally important.10[10]

* * * *

 

I turn now to a second, more privately-defined female community which, nonetheless serves the same ends of women’s publication: the mother-daughter family unit. As a literary strategy which reflects real life decisions concerning women’s empowerment, the inscription of these women’s family bond into their work was quite savvy and, as evidenced in the following example, quite successful.

Madeleine and Catherine des Roches provide the most compelling example of the ways in which advertisement of the mother-daughter bond framed, facilitated and protected their

9[9]Again, Evelyne Berriot-Salvadore’s Les Femmes dans la société française de la Renaissance is particularly useful in this regard. See, in particular, parts IV, A and B (Le type de la “savante” and caractérologie de “l’écrivaine”) and the extensive index. Her discussion includes ample treatment of François de Billon’s work, which can be compared with the combined compendium source, Les Bibliothéques Françoises de La Croix du Maine et de Du Verdier, ed. M. Rigoley de Juvigny (Paris: Michel Lambert, 1772) whose entries are alphabetized by first name.

10[10]Further elaboration of this discussion was delivered orally at the Romance Languages Annual Conference (Purdue University 9 Oct. 1993) and is in revision for inclusion in a lengthier study elsewhere. My development of the dames lyonnaises topos was furthered by readings of the Contes Amoureux of Jeanne Flore who speaks within a community of women from Lyons with names as suggestive as Meduse, Salphionne and Sapho. Fictional though this setting may be, I find it remarkable in its evocation of just the sort of interchange and support as is found in the liminal and poetic works of Louise Labé.

literary production.11[11] Madeleine, twice widowed, lived with her daughter Catherine who chose quite consciously never to marry in order to enjoy a more fruitful, unencumbered literary menage with her mother. Beginning in the year of her second husband’s death (perhaps not inconsequentially), Madeleine, with her daughter, published three works: the Oeuvres of 1578–89, the Secondes Oeuvres of 1583 and the Missives of 1586. The husbandless, fatherless family arrangement which allowed for such literary endeavors, did not go uncriticized, even by the women’s most fervent admirers. With reference to Catherine’s repeated denials of enamored and eligible suitors, the family friend and noted humanist Estienne Pasquier remarks:

 

il n’y a qu’une chose qui me déplaise . . . qu’estant la fille belle en perfection tant de corps que d’esprit . . . requise en mariage par une infinité de personnages d’honneur, toutes-fois elle met toutes ces requestes sous pied; resolue de vivre & mourir avec sa mère. (from original text of Pasquier fol. 192v)

 

“Vivre,” “mourir,” . . . “écrire” is perhaps the more operative verb which Pasquier ignores. Responsible only to each other and, as is obvious in their works, to each others’ learned lives, Madeleine and Catherine des Roches define their family in a way which allows the rare opportu-nity for a private and public—i.e. published—life.12[12]

Madeleine’s first epistle to her daughter (“Epistre à ma Fille”) is telling in this regard. She begins:

 

Les anciens amateurs de sçavoir,

Disoient qu’à Dieu faut rendre le devoir,

Puis au pays, & le tiers au lignage

. . .

Au seigneur je porte reverence,

11[11]Of interest as well in this model is Gabrielle de Coignard whose daughters’ praises in their mother’s posthumous Oeuvres chrestiennes (Tournon: J. Faure, 1595) speak to many of the same legitimizing strategies present in the Des Roches ménage. The tantalizing, though undocumented scholarly pursuits of Marguerite Du Bourg and her daughters also beg investigation. Certain examples from the French royalty appear pertinent yet rely less on literary, familial constructs than on the privileges of nobility to enable their publication.

12[12]For biographical information concerning Madeleine and Catherine des Roches, see Anne Larsen’s erudite and most welcome edition of their Oeuvres of 1578–79 (Geneva: Droz, 1993).

Pour mon pays, je n’ay point de puissance,

Les hommes ont toute l’autorité,

Contre raison & contre l’equité:

Mais envers toy fille qui m’es si proche,

Ce me seroit un grand blasme & reproche

De te conduire au sentier plus battu,

Veu que ton cueur est né à la vertu. (81)

 

To the forces of God and Country, Madeleine is respectively perfunctory (“Au seigneur je porte reverence”) and despairing (“je n’ay point de puissance”). It is to her “lignage,” however, which she sees embodied entirely in her daughter, that she pays the most respect and attention. Speaking in defiance of the male-ordered world—the husbands and fathers to whom she and her daughter are not aligned—Madeleine promotes her own female enterprise.

Though Anne Larsen betrays a general optimism for the marital relationship between Madeleine des Roches and her second husband, François Eboissard, the widow’s first ode speak bitterly of the trials of wedlock:

 

Noz parens ont de loüables coustumes,

Pour nous tollir l’usage de raison,

De nous tenir closes dans la maison

Et nous donner le fuzeau pour la plume

. . .

Il faut soudain que nous changions l’office

Qui nous pouvoit quelque peu façonner

Où les marys ne nous feront sonner

Que l’obeir, le soing, & l’avarice.

 

The point of her ode is spoken perhaps most clearly in her lament just two stanzas hence:

 

Il me suffit aux hommes faire voir

Combien leurs loix nous font de violence. (cf. Larsen 85–90).

 

The promotion of Madeleine and Catherine des Roches’s unmarried existence cannot ignore public expectation and judgement. The society she bemoans as “against all fairness and reason,” is one which finds women’s public voice utterly improper. One of the most distinctive aspects of the works is the liminal correspondence which Madeleine des Roches and her daughter establish—a series of epistles “A Ma Mere” or “A Ma Fille”—which display for the reader the mutual praise that these women hold for each other’s learning, compassion, and, perhaps most importantly, virtue (see Figure at end of article). In these letters which precede the mother’s and daughter’s works in each of the three publications, a place is carved out where they may publicly praise the familial dedication and support which serves to legitimize an otherwise suspect arrangement which has eschewed traditional male authority and made its own claim to female literary renown.

Catherine’s first dedicatory letter to her mother from the Oeuvres of 1578 serves well to illustrate the tenor and the content of this abundant liminal matter which sets about describing and defending their publication. “Ma Mere, je sçay que vous ensuivant, je pourroy suivre un exemple de vertu suivy de bien peu de personnes,” she begins, setting herself quite properly in deference to a maternal authority—humbled, indebted, grateful. The insistence on the verb “suivre” evoked three times in the first sentence establishes at once the idea of a descendance or kinship in terms of Madeleine’s primacy, both biological and intellectual. Having established this relationship of proper respect, Catherine becomes more polemical and defensive. Deflecting the critics—and she suggests there are many—who would question her role as a writer, Catherine provides a succession of “if they, then I” statements which chart her defense. Addressing specifically the standard paranoia regarding the danger of women’s unattended idleness, she counters:

 

je n’y ay jamais employé d’heures, fors celles que les autres filles mettent à visiter les compaignies pour estre veues de leurs plus gentils serviteurs . . . encores qu’elles ayent bien la puissance de se chanter elles mesmes.

 

Catherine rejects such social posturing and finds within her mother’s home a more productive, self-determined life—a point she underscores at the end of her epistle with poignant metaphor. Speaking of her verse, she says to her mother, “si vous en trouvez quelques uns qui soient assez bien nez, avouez les s’ils vous plaist pour voz nepveux.” The literary “progeny” born of this mother-daughter union so elegantly and thoroughly illustrated and defended within their epistles

show the productiveness which this bond has allowed.13[13] The suspected impropriety of the “idle,” barren, unmarried life is dismissed in this letter which hails the production—and in fact re-production—of a mother-daughter literary menage.

Madeleine herself reintroduces this text-progeny metaphor in the prefatory matter of their final published work, Les Missives of 1586. Her “Epistre à ma Fille” compares the anxiety yet necessity of publication with the story of the lost children of Eve which she remembers from a retelling in the eclogues of Baptista Spagnuoli Mantuanus. In the tale, God returns to Adam and Eve to take a census, as it were, and to behold the progeny of the original procreators. Embarrassed at what she fears will appear an indecent display of her procreative activity, Eve initially hides two thirds of her children from view. God is quite happy with Eve’s work and assigns the children positions of high standing in their nascent society. Now hopeful, Eve reveals the second third who receive equally enthusiastic response, and a somewhat lower, yet honorable status. By the time Eve returns with the last of her children, God has disappeared. Madeleine des Roches’s retelling of the story is closely allied with the phenomenon of publishing:

 

Et voicy la troisieme fois que ta force m’encourage de parler en public, où je ne puis m’empescher d’estre saisie d’un peu de crainte par l’exemple de Mantuan” (2)

 

Such are the fears—of rejection, of judgement, of scorn—that Madeleine and Catherine des Roches navigate in their lives and confront in their works.

 

* * * *

 

Having described first the community-defining strategies of a woman vis-à-vis her city’s sisters and then looked into the more private sphere of the mother-daughter unit as source of communal inspiration and support, I will turn to a third locus of female literary companionship which is even more sequestered and exclusive: the convent.

It was common practice for women of sufficient means to be sent to convents where they learned to read and write and to develop an appreciation of literature both sacred and secular. Indeed, it is assumed that it was at the Couvent de la Déserte in Lyons that Louise Labé met her longtime friend, “dame de Lyons,” Clémence de Bourges. That Louise Labé could expect of Clémence de Bourges a work which was “mieux limé et de meilleure grace” assumes equivalent literacy and familiarity with the world of letters in which she published. Though it is certain that much of the fruit of this labor, penned within convent walls, was devotional and circulated

13[13]See again Anne Larsen’s reading of this and suggested parallels in contemporaneous literature (185). The term “neveu,” besides being a broad term for “descendants” which Ronsard has translated as his poetic progeny, also plays undoubtedly on Madeleine’s eponymous maiden name.

within the religious community, published evidence of these women’s literary lives does exist. The works of Anne de Marquets, Sister at the royal convent of Poissy, will serve here to illustrate the benefits of the choice of convent life for the scholastically-minded woman. Again, it is an exclusively female-defined community which can be seen as occasioning and supporting Renaissance women’s interest in writing.

The convent of Poissy was founded in the late thirteenth century by Philip IV and from its beginning was defined in ways favorable to scholarly pursuits. As part of the original charter of this Dominican convent, Philip IV sent friars on extended book-hunting expeditions, copying and commissioning works for the Sisters’ library. Christine de Pizan gives testimony to the grandeur of this place of worship and learning during the century after its founding: in the “Dit de Poissy” she describes a visit to her daughter there, thriving in Poissy’s Utopian enclosure and Christine herself is depicted in manuscript illuminations, studying and writing in the ornate library which served as her final retreat.

By the time of Anne de Marquets, Poissy had enjoyed the governance of several royal abbesses and counted upwards of 100 to 120 young charges in its convent school. Due to its close proximity to Paris and the royal retreat at Saint Germain-en-Laye, Poissy saw an unusual amount of intellectual and politico-religious traffic. It is conjectured that the humanist Henri Estienne may well have been her preceptor. Anne de Marquets herself served as preceptor to Marguerite de Valois, to whom she later offered (by commission) her translations of Marc-Antonio Flaminio’s Latin spiritual verse. By that time (1568), De Marquets had already gained some public renown because of the publication of her Sonets, prières et devises in honor of the colloquium at Poissy (1562), a meeting of Protestant and Catholic church leaders called by Catherine de Medici in an attempt to stem the tide of religious war.

It is Anne de Marquets’s final work, the posthumous Sonets spirituels (1605) which illustrate most convincingly, perhaps, the prominence and purpose of her life of teaching and writing at Poissy. The liminal elogia to De Marquets include poems from the Pleiade cornerstone Pierre de Ronsard and from his mentor, Hellenist Jean Dorat. In addition, several of her Sister colleagues wrote works in her honor, testifying to Anne de Marquets’s erudite tutelage and witnessing her legacy.

The text itself consists of a poetic cycle of 480 sonnets which treat various moments of the Catholic Christian year in chronological order. The collection, based on the medieval tradition of the Book’s of Hours, is highly influenced by prescriptive passages from the Divine Office and readings from the Gospels and Epistles contained in the Dominican Missal and Breviary. The book is therefore inspirational and instructive. In the sonnets, De Marquets’s pupils learn of all of the major events of the Bible in detail, with particular attention given to illustrious women. The Sonets Spirituels serve in this way as a compendium of spiritual, female ancestry which in no small way exemplifies De Marquets’s conventual community.14[14]

14[14]The following is a partial list of women cited by De Marquets in the Sonets Spirituels which give testimony to the range of female precedent from which she draws: Caleb’s daughter (96), Sara and Agar (113), Anne (130), the daughters of Zion (139), Eve (159), Rebecca (160), Judith (348), Saint Anne (353), Deborah (356), Susanne (360), Elizabeth (374), Mary, sister of Aaron

Sonnet 381 is particularly revealing both in terms of this compendium strategy and as presentation of Anne de Marquets’s career as a conflation of religious and literary commitments. The sonnet speaks of a joyous female tradition of lyric, devotional praise-making:

 

Marie qui fut soeur d’Aaron & de Moyse,

Voyant que Dieu avoit, sauvant le peuple sien,

Submergé Pharaon & l’ost Egyptien,

Un cantique chanta, de joye estant surprise:

 

Et Marie aujourd’huy que Christ pour mere a prise,

Voyant que Dieu sauvant tout le peuple Chrestien,

T’a destruict, ô Sathan & l’exercite tien,

Un cantique a chanté de saincte ardeur esprise.

 

Plusieurs femmes suyvoient la premiere Marie,

Chantans & loüans Dieu par gracieux accords;

Maintes Vierges aussi la seconde ont suivie,

 

Se dedians à Dieu & d’esprit & de corps,

Pour chanter nuict & jour, comme au ciel font les Anges,

Et de coeur & de voix du grand Dieu les loüanges. (my emphasis)

 

The poem provides a microcosmic view of the way in which her recording of female, biblical ancestry works with her young readers. In the sonnet we see demonstrated a conscious change of register from description in the quatrains to prescription in the tercets: just as Mary, the mother of Christ, had a “foremother” in the example of Mary, the sister of Aaron and Moses, so do De Marquets’s contemporaries have both of these models to look back on. Their avowed roles as mirrors of the Virgin Mary make this call to praise all but imperative. If there is any

question as to the identity of these “Plusieurs femmes”(l. 9), it is quickly answered with the “Maintes Vierges” who dedicate their lives to poetry in the service of God and the Virgin Mary.

De Marquets shows her charges a religious, Biblical, female precedent for the study in which she instructs them. The example of the two Marys’ songs bespeaks a tradition of spontaneous, prophetic incantations; De Marquets’s conventual audience, however, is too familiar with their teacher’s commitment to writing to be able to translate these “cantiques” in their personal lives as anything but a scholarly, literary act. These potential singers of religious piety are called to both Christ and devotional study. De Marquets furnishes her pupils with the female, lyric tradition from which they may draw strength and nourishment in their own sacred, scholastic endeavor.

 

* * * *

 

I suggest that all three of the communities which I have commented in this discussion, however well established, represented challenges to the male-dominated family system. Louise Labé’s textual côterie of “dames lyonnoises,” Madeleine and Catherine des Roches’s mother-daughter household, and Anne de Marquets’s Sisterhood are all communities which aim at reconstituting the needs and roles of a family into a strictly female universe. Distanced, though certainly not entirely, from direct male intervention in their daily literary lives, these women were able to write. As History—and in particular Women’s History of this period—will have it, we read what we must assume to be the exceptional women—those who published—to speak for what we might now conjecture was a much larger population: women writing in salons and in pairs similar to the Des Rocheses; writing in the homes of prosperous humanist printer-fathers in Lyons; writing to the glory of God in countless convents across France. It is my assertion that there were arrangements to be made for women’s active and productive participation in writing and that many pragmatic women made these arrangements consciously and to great effect. Yes, I would contend, there were women who, by their own invention and effort, sacrifice and bravery, had a Renaissance.

 

Works Cited

Berriot-Salvadore, Evelyne. Les Femmes dans la société française de la Renaissance. Geneva: Droz, 1990.

Billon, François de. Le fort inexpugnable de l’honneur du sexe feminin. Paris: Allyer, 1555.

Brown, Judith. Rev. of Women, History and Theory: The Essays of Joan Kelly. American Historical Review 92.4 (1987): 938–40.

Christine de Pizan. La Cité des Dames. Ed. Thérèse Moreau and Eric Hicks. Pairs: Stock, 1986.

de Marquets, Anne. Sonets Spirituels. Paris: C. Morel, 1605.

Des Roches, Catherine and Marie. Les Oeuvres de Mes-dames des Roches de Poictiers mere & fille. Paris: l’Anglier, 1578.

___. Les Secondes oeuvres de Mes-dames des Roches de Poictiers mere & fille. Poitiers: Nicolas Courtoys, 1583.

___. Les Missives de Mes-dames des Roches de Poitiers mere et fille, avec le Ravissement de Proserpine prins du Latin, de Clodian. Paris: l’Angelier, 1586.

du Moulin, Antoine. Preface. “Antoine du Moulin aux Dames Lyonnoizes.” By Pernette du Guillet. Ed. V. E. Graham. Geneva: Droz, 1968. 1–4.

Fontaine, Marie-Madeleine. “‘Un Coeur Mis en Gage’ Pontus de Tyard, Marguerite de Bourg et le Milieu Lyonais Des Années 1550.” Nouvelle Revue du XVIème Siècle 2 (1984): 69–89.

Herlihy David. “Did Women Have a Renaissance? A Reconsideration.” Medievalia et Humanistica ns 13 (1985): 1–22.

Jones, Ann Rosalind. “Assimilation with a Difference: Renaissance Women Poets and Literary Influence.” Yale French Studies 62 (1981): 135–53.

___. “Nets and Bridles: Early Modern Conduct Books and Sixteenth-Century Women’s Lyrics.” The Ideology of Conduct: Essays on Literature and the History of Sexuality. Ed. Armstrong and Tennenhouse. New York: Methuen, 1987.

Kelly, Joan. Women, History & Theory. Chicago: Chicago UP, 1984. 19–50.

Kiefer Lewalski, Barbara. “Writing Women and Reading the Renaissance.” Renaissance Quarterly 44.4 (Winter 1991): 792–821.

King, Margaret L. Women of the Renaissance. Introd. Catherine Stimpson. Chicago: Chicago UP, 1991.

Labé, Louise. Oeuvres Complètes. Ed. E. Giudici. Geneva: Droz, 1981.

Pasquier, Estienne. Lettres familières. Ed. D. Thickett. Geneva: Droz, 1974.

Rigolot, François. “Louise Labé et la Redécouverte de Sappho.” Nouvelle Revue du Seizième Siècle 1 (1983): 19–31.

Showalter, Elaine. “Towards a Feminist Poetics.” The New Feminist Criticism: Essays on Women, Literature & Theory. Ed. Elaine Showalter. New York: Pantheon, 1985). 125–43.

Thomas Neely, Carol. “Recent Work in Renaissance Studies: Psychology, Did Madness Have a Renaissance?” Renaissance Quarterly 44.4 (Winter 1991): 776–91.

Vives, Juan Luis. Opera Omnia: Joannis Ludovici Vivis Valentini. Vols. 1–4. Valentiae Edetanorum, 1783. The Education of a Christian Woman. Trans. Richard Hyrde. London: Thomas Berth, 1541.

Watson, Foster. Vives and the Renascence Education of Women. New York: Longmans, Green & Co., 1912.

Zemon Davis, Natalie. “City Women and Religious Change.” Society and Culture in Early Modern France. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1965.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

(381), the wife of Tobias (398), Naomi and the Sunamite (401), Esther (405), Rebecca and Rachel (426), Abigail (437), Vasthi (456), and Ruth (469). Numerous other anonymous heroines mentioned in groups or as individuals populate this text as well.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Figure

Reproduction of the title pages and epistles in the entire work of Madeleine and Catherine des Roches