Louise Labé

Louise Labé

Louise Labé; engraving by Pierre Woeiriot, 1555
Born 1520–22
Lyon
Died April 25, 1566
Parcieux-en-Dombes
Language French
Nationality French

Louise Labé, (c. 1520 or 1522, Lyon – April 25, 1566, Parcieux), also identified as La Belle Cordière, (The Beautiful Ropemaker), was a female French poet of the Renaissance, born in Lyon, the daughter of a rich ropemaker, Pierre Charly, and his second wife, Etiennette Roybet. A recent book has argued that the poetry ascribed to her was a feminist creation of a number of French male poets of the Renaissance (see below). (See below, "The Huchon Hypothesis".)

Biography

Both her father and her stepmother Antoinette Taillard (whom Pierre Charly married following Etiennette Roybet's death in 1523) were illiterate, but Labé received an education in Latin, Italian and music, perhaps in a convent school.

After her death, this once controversial figure came to be celebrated in Lyon as a symbol of local pride. One oft-repeated colorful tale about her claims that the siege of Perpignan, or in a tournament there, she dressed in male clothing and fought on horseback in the ranks of the Dauphin, afterwards Henry II.

Between 1543 and 1545 she married Ennemond Perrin, a marriage dictated in her father's will, and which established the succession of the rope manufacturing business he was involved in.

Lyon was the cultural centre of France in the first half of the sixteenth century[1] and she became active in a circle of Lyonnais poets and humanists grouped around the figure of Maurice Scève. Her Œuvres were printed in 1555, by the renowned Lyonnais printer Jean de Tournes.

In addition to her own writings, the volume contained twenty-four poems in her honor, authored by her male contemporaries and entitled Escriz de divers poetes, a la louenge de Louize Labe Lionnoize ("Writings of diverse poets, in praise of Louise Labé of Lyons"). The authors of these praise poems (not all of whom can be reliably identified) include Maurice Scève, Pontus de Tyard, Claude de Taillemont, Clément Marot, Olivier de Magny, Jean-Antoine de Baïf, Mellin de Saint-Gelais, Antoine du Moulin, and Antoine Fumee.

Although there are certain uncontested biographical documents, the lack of sure information on what sort of a life Louise Labé led has given rise to much speculation, often in the form of romantic novels in which she features as the heroine. It has been suggested that Magny was her lover. Magny's Odes contained a poem (A Sire Aymon) that mocked and belittled Labé's husband (who had died by 1557). Debate on whether Labé was or was not a courtesan began in the sixteenth century, and has continued up to the present day. In 1557 a popular song on the scandalous behavior of La Cordière was published in Lyon. Already in 1584 we find the opinion that her works were too learned to have been written by a simple woman (expressed by Pierre de Saint-Julien). In 1560 Jean Calvin referred to her cross-dressing and called her a plebeia meretrix or common whore. Scholars deliberate carefully over what status to accord to such statements published in a piece of religious propaganda by a writer whose tone has been described as vicious and hysterical, and similarly question to what extent the historian Paradin, writing in 1573, was aiming at neutral objectivity in writing "She had a face more angelic than human, which was yet nothing in comparison with her spirit which was so chaste, so virtuous, so poetic and of such uncommon knowledge that it would seem to have been created by God so that we may wonder at it as something prodigious."

In 1564, the plague broke out in Lyon, taking the lives of some of Labé's friends. In 1565, suffering herself from bad health, she retired to the home of her companion Thomas Fortin, a banker from Florence, who witnessed her will (a document that is extant). She died in 1566, and was buried on her country property close to Parcieux-en-Dombes, outside Lyon.

Debates on whether or not she was a courtesan and other aspects of her life have not always been of interest to critics who have focussed increasing attention on her writings, especially her verse.

Works and Reception

Her Œuvres include two prose works: a feminist preface, urging women to write, that is dedicated to a young noblewoman of Lyon, Clemence de Bourges; and a dramatic allegory in prose entitled Débat de Folie et d'Amour, which belongs to a long tradition with examples from antiquity through to the Middle Ages, a tradition that had gained contempoarary prominence due to the controversial satire, Erasmus' Praise of Folly. The Débat, the most admired of her works in the sixteenth century, was used as the source for one of the fables of Jean de la Fontaine, and was translated into English by Robert Greene in 1584.

Her poetry consists of three elegies in the style of the Heroides of Ovid, and twenty-four sonnets that draw on the traditions of Neoplatonism and Petrarchism. The great theme of her sonnets are the longings, torments and satisfactions of a passionate love which, however noble, is very much of this world, with no metaphysical concepts evoked and no references to a more perfect world than this one. A critic such as Breghot du Lut, writing for the 1824 edition of her works, found that he must apologise to the reader for her explicitness of some of her works; Saint-Beuve, in 1845, expressed something that was to become a refrain for readers and critics up to this day: despite hew work showing that she was highly learned, this does not prevent her from seeming to speak to contemporary readers in a very direct way.

Her poetry was singled out among that of her contemporaries for special praise by Rilke, with Ferdimand Brunetière, in his 1900 article on the Pléiade and Lyonnese schools, writing that her poetry was the first time in French that passion was expressed with such vehemence and naiveté. Modern critics cite her rejection of the more showy or extravagant metaphors and poetic effects employed by poets such as Scève or Pernette du Guillet as one of the key components of her originality and appeal for the modern reader, with Jerry C. Nash writing in 1980

"Labé's lyrical voice is truly one of the best expressions in literature of artful simplicity, of a consistent and masterly synthesis of fond and forme, of passion and poetry".

Readers have, from the middle of the last century, commented on how in her verse she presents women in a way that goes against prevailing attitudes about what a woman's nature was or what made a woman either praiseworthey or blameworthy, a feature which makes her appear more in step with modern ideas than her contemporaries were. The frank expression of female desire had previously been confined to comic genres such as fabliaux.[2][3]

In 2005, Labé's work was included on the programme of a very prestigious exam in France, sparking a flurry of academic publications. The most remarked upon of these was the 2006 book Louise Labé: une créature de papier (Droz); discussed below.

The sonnets have been her most famous works following the early modern period, and were translated into German by Rainer Maria Rilke and into Dutch by Pieter Cornelis Boutens. They have been translated into English by Annie Finch and Deborah Lesko Baker (2006), and by Richard Siebuth in a volume published by NYRB (2014).

Marc Fumaroli and Mireille Huchon

In her 2006 book the eminent Sorbonne professor and specialist of Rabelais Mireille Huchon argued that Louise Labé was not the author of the works signed with her name but rather that these works were by the Lyonnais poets Maurice Scève, Olivier de Magny, Claude de Taillemont, Jacques Peletier du Mans, Guillaume des Autels, and others, and by the publisher Jean de Tournes. There have indeed been literary hoaxes of the period, where works have been attributed to a fictional female poet; Huchon claimed to have uncovered another. Marc Fumaroli called Huchon's argument "irrefutable" in the literature supplement of Le Monde.[4] According to this view, the majority of biographers have been incompetent in their evaluation of the biographical evidence and contemporary readers have been blinded from seeing the work clearly by their desire to find a poet who fits in with their pro-feminist agenda.[5] In contrast to the greatly respected yet notably conservative Fumaroli, when other critics and scholars examined Huchon's essay they frequently found her reasoning absurd and judged that her interpretation of the biographical evidence seemed to show inexplicable bias and reliance on unfounded assumptions. The lack of any new evidence in support of her thesis was a further reason for the ease with which many dismissed her ideas as mistaken and considered her work to have made no contribution to scholarship. Huchon's audacious thesis has not disappeared from view, however. It is supported by some scholars and widely cited in short biographies of the poet as an intriguing possibility.[6]

See also

Notes

  1. ↑ Robin, Larsen and Levin, p. 192.
  2. ↑ All quotes relating to the work's reception by critics from pages 250-261, Oeuvres complètes présentation par François Rigolot, Flammarion, 2004, Paris. (1st edition 1986)
  3. ↑ Other general discussion e.g. related to feminism and the originality of the peot, see the introduction to Oeuvres poétiques / Louise Labé. précédées des Rymes de Pernette Du Guillet. avec une sélection de Blasons du corps féminin / édition présentée, établie et annotée par Françoise Charpentier. Gallimard, 1983
  4. ↑ Fumaroli, Le Monde, May 5, 2006.
  5. ↑ everything on siefar, plus p80 of Mireille Huchon quoted by Laurent Angard, « « Louer Louise » ou l’énigme Louise Labé. », Acta fabula, vol. 7, n° 2, Mai 2006, URL : http://www.fabula.org/revue/document1316.php, page consultée le 06 décembre 2014.
  6. ↑ The French webpage entitled "Louise Labé attaquée!" ("Louise Labe attacked!") at is collecting published responses to Huchon's book and making them available online. Scholars who disagree with part or all of Huchon's theory include Emmanuel Buron, "Claude de Taillemont et les Escriz de divers Poëtes à la louenge de Louïze Labé Lionnoize. Discussion critique de Louise Labé, une créature de papier, de Mireille Huchon," L'Information littéraire 2, 2006, p. 38-46 (); Henri Hours and Bernard Plessy, "Sur Louise Labé, rien de nouveau," Le Bulletin des Lettres, October 2006, p. 3-5 (); Madeleine Lazard, "Droit de réponse envoyé au Monde des livres, non publié" (); Daniel Martin, "Louise Labé est-elle ‘une creature de papier’?" Réforme, Humanisme, Renaissance 63, December 2006, p. 7-37 (); and Eliane Viennot, "Notice sur Louise Labé," Théâtre de femmes de l’Ancien Régime, December 2006, p. 377-379 ().

References

External links

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