Madeleine roches, catherine roches from mother and daughter poems, dialogues, and letters of les dames des roches the other voice in early modern europe 2006

2006] From mother and daughter : poems, dialogues, and letters of les dames Des Roches / Madeleine and Catherine Des Roches ; edited and translated by Anne R.. I thank Max Engammare enth

The Contest for Knowledge:

Debates over Women’s Learning in

Eighteenth-Century Italy

Edited and Tran slated by Rebecca Messbarger

and Paula Findlen

F R A N C I S C A D E L O S A P Ó S T O L E S

The Inquisition of Francisca:

A Sixteenth-Century Visionary on Trial

Edited and Translated by

Sonnets for Michelangelo

Edited and Translated by Abigail Brundin

M A R I E D E N T I È R E

Epistle to Marguerite de Navarre and

Preface to a Sermon by John Calvin

Edited and Translated by Mary B McKinley

M A D A M E D E M A I N T E N O N

Dialogues and Addresses

Edited and Translated by John J Conley, S.J.

The Court Midwife

Edited and Translated by Lynne Tatlock

M A D A M E D E V I L L E D I E U

(Marie-Catherine Desjardins) Memoirs of the Life of Henriette-Sylvie de Molière: A Novel

Edited and Translated by Donna Kuizenga

Catherine des Roches, 1542–1587 Anne R Larsen is professor of modern and classical languages at Hope

College and the editor of the three-volume critical edition of the collected writings of Madeleine and Catherine des Roches The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2006 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved Published 2006 Printed in the United States of America

ISBN: 0-226-72338-0 (paper) ISBN: 0-226-72337-2 (cloth) Excerpts from Les Œuvres © 1993 by Librairie Droz S.A All rights reserved.

Excerpts from Les Secondes Œuvres © 1998 by Librairie Droz S.A

All rights reserved.

The University of Chicago Press gratefully acknowledges the generous support of James E Rabil, in memory of Scottie W Rabil, toward the

publication of this book.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Des Roches, Madeleine Neveu, dame, ca 1520–1587.

[Selections English 2006]

From mother and daughter : poems, dialogues, and letters of les dames Des Roches / Madeleine and Catherine Des Roches ; edited and translated

by Anne R Larsen.— 1st ed.

p cm — (The other voice in early modern Europe)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-226-72337-2 (cloth : alk paper) —

ISBN 0-226-72338-0 (pbk : alk paper)

I Des Roches, Catherine Fredonnoit, dame, 1542–1587

II Larsen, Anne R III Title IV Series.

PQ1609.D49A6 2006

841
.3—dc22 2005034483

o The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences — Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.

Acknowledgments ix Series Editors’ Introduction xi Volume Editor’s Introduction 1 Volume Editor’s Bibliography 29 Note on Translation 39

I Selected Poems of Madeleine des Roches

from Les Œuvres (1579) 41

II Selected Poems of Catherine des Roches

from Les Œuvres (1579) 80

III Selected Poems of Madeleine des Roches and

Catherine des Roches from Les Secondes Œuvres (1583) 132

IV The Dialogues of Catherine des Roches from Les Œuvres (1579) and Les Secondes Œuvres (1583) 180

V Selected Letters of Madeleine des Roches and Catherine des

Roches from Les Missives (1586) 243

Series Editors’ Bibliography 295

Index 313

Iam deeply grateful for the kind help and encouragement of my colleaguesBrigitte Hamon-Porter, Isabelle Chapuis-Alvarez, Vicki De Vries, Sander

de Haan, Paulette Chaponnière, Gloria Tseng, Provost James Boelkins, andDean William Reynolds from Hope College I thank Sarah Beaubien in theInterlibrary Loan Office at Hope College’s Van Wylen Library

My warmest thanks go as well to Marian Rothstein and Julie Campbellfor their careful editing of the introduction, and to Régine Reynolds-Cornell,Diana Robin, Cathy Yandell, and Kirk Read for their insightful commentsand suggestions on the introductions to the chapters

I am grateful to Margaret King and to Albert Rabil Jr for their astic support of the project and to the editors, especially Susan Tarcov, whoworked with me at the University of Chicago Press I thank Max Engammare

enthusi-of Librairie Droz for permission to reprint the following copyrighted Frenchtexts from my critical editions of Madeleine and Catherine des Roches, Les Œuvres (Geneva: Droz, 1993) and Les Secondes Œuvres (Geneva: Droz, 1998):

from Les Œuvres, (by Madeleine) Epistre aux Dames, Epistre à ma Fille, Odes

1, 3, 4, Sonnets 1, 5, 6–9, 11, 15, 16, 20, 22, 35, 36, Epitaphe de feu MaistreFrançois Éboissard, Au Roy, Sonnets V, IV; (by Catherine) Epistre à sa Mere,Sonnets de Sincero à Charite, Sonnets de Charite à Sincero, Pour une Masca-rade d’Amazones, Chanson des Amazones, A ma quenoille, A mes escrits, AuRoy, A G P., A Ma Mere, La Femme forte descritte par Salomon, L’Agnodice;from Les Secondes Œuvres, (by Madeleine) A ma Fille, Ode 2, Sonnets 1–4,

Poitiers à Messieurs des Grandz Jours, Huitan; (by Catherine) Epistre à saMere, Les Responces 1, 3, 4, 6, 9–12, 18, 23, 24, 29–37, 41–44, A Messieurstenant les Grands Jours à Poitiers, La Puce, Epitaphe 2

This translation was made possible through the generous support of theNational Endowment for the Humanities, a Faculty-Student Collaborative ix

Research Summer Grant from Hope College which facilitated work on thetranslations with Michael Brinks, and the Department of Modern and Clas-sical Languages at Hope College as well as Karen Barber-Gibson for addi-tional funding to work with Lauren Hinkle on the transcription of the Frenchpoems I thank as well Julie Ouvrard for help on the index.

This translation is dedicated to Michael Brinks, whose tireless work andartful translations over a summer and a term provided much inspiration to me

in bringing the Dames des Roches to an English-speaking audience

Anne R Larsen

on the public agenda: equal pay, child care, domestic abuse, breast cancer search, and curricular revision with an eye to the inclusion of women.

re-These recent achievements have their origins in things women (andsome male supporters) said for the first time about six hundred years ago.Theirs is the “other voice,” in contradistinction to the “first voice,” the voice

of the educated men who created Western culture Coincident with a eral reshaping of European culture in the period 1300–1700 (called the Re-naissance or early modern period), questions of female equality and oppor-tunity were raised that still resound and are still unresolved

gen-The other voice emerged against the backdrop of a three-thousand-yearhistory of the derogation of women rooted in the civilizations related toWestern culture: Hebrew, Greek, Roman, and Christian Negative attitudestoward women inherited from these traditions pervaded the intellectual,medical, legal, religious, and social systems that developed during the Euro-pean Middle Ages

The following pages describe the traditional, overwhelmingly maleviews of women’s nature inherited by early modern Europeans and the newtradition that the “other voice” called into being to begin to challenge reign-ing assumptions This review should serve as a framework for understandingthe texts published in the series the Other Voice in Early Modern Europe In-troductions specific to each text and author follow this essay in all the vol-umes of the series

xi

T R A D I T I O N A L V I E W S O F W O M E N , 5 0 0 B C E – 1 5 0 0 C E

Embedded in the philosophical and medical theories of the ancient Greekswere perceptions of the female as inferior to the male in both mind and body.Similarly, the structure of civil legislation inherited from the ancient Romanswas biased against women, and the views on women developed by Christianthinkers out of the Hebrew Bible and the Christian New Testament werenegative and disabling Literary works composed in the vernacular of ordi-nary people, and widely recited or read, conveyed these negative assump-tions The social networks within which most women lived—those of thefamily and the institutions of the Roman Catholic Church—were shaped bythis negative tradition and sharply limited the areas in which women mightact in and upon the world

G R E E K P H I L O S O P H Y A N D F E M A L E N AT U R E Greek biology assumedthat women were inferior to men and defined them as merely childbearersand housekeepers This view was authoritatively expressed in the works ofthe philosopher Aristotle

Aristotle thought in dualities He considered action superior to inaction,form (the inner design or structure of any object) superior to matter, comple-tion to incompletion, possession to deprivation In each of these dualities, heassociated the male principle with the superior quality and the female with theinferior “The male principle in nature,” he argued, “is associated with active,formative and perfected characteristics, while the female is passive, materialand deprived, desiring the male in order to become complete.”1Men are al-ways identified with virile qualities, such as judgment, courage, and stamina,and women with their opposites—irrationality, cowardice, and weakness.The masculine principle was considered superior even in the womb Theman’s semen, Aristotle believed, created the form of a new human creature,while the female body contributed only matter (The existence of the ovum,and with it the other facts of human embryology, was not established untilthe seventeenth century.) Although the later Greek physician Galen believedthere was a female component in generation, contributed by “female semen,”the followers of both Aristotle and Galen saw the male role in human gener-ation as more active and more important

In the Aristotelian view, the male principle sought always to reproduceitself The creation of a female was always a mistake, therefore, resulting from

1 Aristotle, Physics 1.9.192a20–24, in The Complete Works of Aristotle, ed Jonathan Barnes, rev

Ox-ford trans., 2 vols (Princeton, 1984), 1:328.

an imperfect act of generation Every female born was considered a tive” or “mutilated” male (as Aristotle’s terminology has variously been trans-lated), a “monstrosity” of nature.2

“defec-For Greek theorists, the biology of males and females was the key totheir psychology The female was softer and more docile, more apt to be de-spondent, querulous, and deceitful Being incomplete, moreover, she cravedsexual fulfillment in intercourse with a male The male was intellectual, active,and in control of his passions

These psychological polarities derived from the theory that the universeconsisted of four elements (earth, fire, air, and water), expressed in humanbodies as four “humors” (black bile, yellow bile, blood, and phlegm) consid-ered, respectively, dry, hot, damp, and cold and corresponding to mentalstates (“melancholic,” “choleric,” “sanguine,” “phlegmatic”) In this scheme themale, sharing the principles of earth and fire, was dry and hot; the female,sharing the principles of air and water, was cold and damp

Female psychology was further affected by her dominant organ, theuterus (womb), hystera in Greek The passions generated by the womb made

women lustful, deceitful, talkative, irrational, indeed—when these affectswere in excess—“hysterical.”

Aristotle’s biology also had social and political consequences If the maleprinciple was superior and the female inferior, then in the household, as inthe state, men should rule and women must be subordinate That hierarchydid not rule out the companionship of husband and wife, whose cooperationwas necessary for the welfare of children and the preservation of property.Such mutuality supported male preeminence

Aristotle’s teacher Plato suggested a different possibility: that men andwomen might possess the same virtues The setting for this proposal is theimaginary and ideal Republic that Plato sketches in a dialogue of that name.Here, for a privileged elite capable of leading wisely, all distinctions of classand wealth dissolve, as, consequently, do those of gender Without house-holds or property, as Plato constructs his ideal society, there is no need forthe subordination of women Women may therefore be educated to the samelevel as men to assume leadership Plato’s Republic remained imaginary, how-ever In real societies, the subordination of women remained the norm andthe prescription

The views of women inherited from the Greek philosophical traditionbecame the basis for medieval thought In the thirteenth century, the su-preme Scholastic philosopher Thomas Aquinas, among others, still echoed

2 Aristotle, Generation of Animals 2.3.737a27–28, in Complete Works, 1:1144.

Aristotle’s views of human reproduction, of male and female personalities,and of the preeminent male role in the social hierarchy.

R O M A N L AW A N D T H E F E M A L E C O N D I T I O N Roman law, like Greekphilosophy, underlay medieval thought and shaped medieval society Theancient belief that adult property-owning men should administer householdsand make decisions affecting the community at large is the very fulcrum ofRoman law

About 450 B.C.E., during Rome’s republican era, the community’s tomary law was recorded (legendarily) on twelve tablets erected in the city’scentral forum It was later elaborated by professional jurists whose activityincreased in the imperial era, when much new legislation was passed, espe-cially on issues affecting family and inheritance This growing, changingbody of laws was eventually codified in the Corpus of Civil Law under the di-

cus-rection of the emperor Justinian, generations after the empire ceased to beruled from Rome That Corpus, read and commented on by medieval scholars

from the eleventh century on, inspired the legal systems of most of the citiesand kingdoms of Europe

Laws regarding dowries, divorce, and inheritance pertain primarily towomen Since those laws aimed to maintain and preserve property, thewomen concerned were those from the property-owning minority Theirsubordination to male family members points to the even greater subordina-tion of lower-class and slave women, about whom the laws speak little

In the early republic, the paterfamilias, or “father of the family,” possessed patria potestas, “paternal power.” The term pater, “father,” in both these cases

does not necessarily mean biological father but denotes the head of a hold The father was the person who owned the household’s property and,indeed, its human members The paterfamilias had absolute power—including

house-the power, rarely exercised, of life or death—over his wife, his children, andhis slaves, as much as his cattle

Male children could be “emancipated,” an act that granted legal omy and the right to own property Those over fourteen could be emanci-pated by a special grant from the father or automatically by their father’sdeath But females could never be emancipated; instead, they passed from theauthority of their father to that of a husband or, if widowed or orphanedwhile still unmarried, to a guardian or tutor

auton-Marriage in its traditional form placed the woman under her husband’sauthority, or manus He could divorce her on grounds of adultery, drinking

wine, or stealing from the household, but she could not divorce him Shecould neither possess property in her own right nor bequeath any to her chil-

dren upon her death When her husband died, the household propertypassed not to her but to his male heirs And when her father died, she had noclaim to any family inheritance, which was directed to her brothers or moreremote male relatives The effect of these laws was to exclude women fromcivil society, itself based on property ownership.

In the later republican and imperial periods, these rules were cantly modified Women rarely married according to the traditional form.The practice of “free” marriage allowed a woman to remain under her father’sauthority, to possess property given her by her father (most frequently the

signifi-“dowry,” recoverable from the husband’s household on his death), and to herit from her father She could also bequeath property to her own childrenand divorce her husband, just as he could divorce her

in-Despite this greater freedom, women still suffered enormous disabilityunder Roman law Heirs could belong only to the father’s side, never themother’s Moreover, although she could bequeath her property to her chil-dren, she could not establish a line of succession in doing so A woman was

“the beginning and end of her own family,” said the jurist Ulpian Moreover,women could play no public role They could not hold public office, repre-sent anyone in a legal case, or even witness a will Women had only a privateexistence and no public personality

The dowry system, the guardian, women’s limited ability to transmitwealth, and total political disability are all features of Roman law adopted bythe medieval communities of western Europe, although modified according

to local customary laws

C H R I S T I A N D O C T R I N E A N D W O M E N ’ S P L A C E The Hebrew Bible andthe Christian New Testament authorized later writers to limit women to therealm of the family and to burden them with the guilt of original sin The pas-sages most fruitful for this purpose were the creation narratives in Genesisand sentences from the Epistles defining women’s role within the Christianfamily and community

Each of the first two chapters of Genesis contains a creation narrative Inthe first “God created man in his own image, in the image of God he createdhim; male and female he created them” (Gn 1:27) In the second, God cre-ated Eve from Adam’s rib (2:21–23) Christian theologians relied principally

on Genesis 2 for their understanding of the relation between man andwoman, interpreting the creation of Eve from Adam as proof of her subordi-nation to him

The creation story in Genesis 2 leads to that of the temptations in esis 3: of Eve by the wily serpent and of Adam by Eve As read by Christian

Gen-theologians from Tertullian to Thomas Aquinas, the narrative made Eve sponsible for the Fall and its consequences She instigated the act; she de-ceived her husband; she suffered the greater punishment Her disobediencemade it necessary for Jesus to be incarnated and to die on the cross From thepulpit, moralists and preachers for centuries conveyed to women the guiltthat they bore for original sin.

re-The Epistles offered advice to early Christians on building communities

of the faithful Among the matters to be regulated was the place of women.Paul offered views favorable to women in Galatians 3:28: “There is neitherJew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor fe-male; for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” Paul also referred to women as hiscoworkers and placed them on a par with himself and his male coworkers(Phlm 4:2–3; Rom 16:1–3; 1 Cor 16:19) Elsewhere, Paul limited women’spossibilities: “But I want you to understand that the head of every man isChrist, the head of a woman is her husband, and the head of Christ is God”(1 Cor 11:3)

Biblical passages by later writers (although attributed to Paul) enjoinedwomen to forgo jewels, expensive clothes, and elaborate coiffures; and theyforbade women to “teach or have authority over men,” telling them to “learn

in silence with all submissiveness” as is proper for one responsible for sin,consoling them, however, with the thought that they will be saved throughchildbearing (1 Tm 2:9–15) Other texts among the later Epistles definedwomen as the weaker sex and emphasized their subordination to their hus-bands (1 Pt 3:7; Col 3:18; Eph 5:22–23)

These passages from the New Testament became the arsenal employed

by theologians of the early church to transmit negative attitudes towardwomen to medieval Christian culture—above all, Tertullian (On the Apparel of Women), Jerome (Against Jovinian), and Augustine (The Literal Meaning of Genesis).

T H E I M A G E O F W O M E N I N M E D I E VA L L I T E R AT U R E The cal, legal, and religious traditions born in antiquity formed the basis of themedieval intellectual synthesis wrought by trained thinkers, mostly clerics,writing in Latin and based largely in universities The vernacular literary tra-dition that developed alongside the learned tradition also spoke about femalenature and women’s roles Medieval stories, poems, and epics also portrayedwomen negatively—as lustful and deceitful—while praising good house-keepers and loyal wives as replicas of the Virgin Mary or the female saints andmartyrs

philosophi-There is an exception in the movement of “courtly love” that evolved insouthern France from the twelfth century Courtly love was the erotic lovebetween a nobleman and noblewoman, the latter usually superior in social

rank It was always adulterous From the conventions of courtly love derivemodern Western notions of romantic love The tradition has had an impactdisproportionate to its size, for it affected only a tiny elite, and very fewwomen The exaltation of the female lover probably does not reflect a higherevaluation of women or a step toward their sexual liberation More likely itgives expression to the social and sexual tensions besetting the knightly class

at a specific historical juncture

The literary fashion of courtly love was on the wane by the thirteenthcentury, when the widely read Romance of the Rose was composed in French by

two authors of significantly different dispositions Guillaume de Lorris posed the initial four thousand verses about 1235, and Jean de Meun addedabout seventeen thousand verses—more than four times the original—about1265

com-The fragment composed by Guillaume de Lorris stands squarely in thetradition of courtly love Here the poet, in a dream, is admitted into a walledgarden where he finds a magic fountain in which a rosebush is reflected Helongs to pick one rose, but the thorns prevent his doing so, even as he iswounded by arrows from the god of love, whose commands he agrees toobey The rest of this part of the poem recounts the poet’s unsuccessful efforts

to pluck the rose

The longer part of the Romance by Jean de Meun also describes a dream.

But here allegorical characters give long didactic speeches, providing a socialsatire on a variety of themes, some pertaining to women Love is an anxiousand tormented state, the poem explains: women are greedy and manipula-tive, marriage is miserable, beautiful women are lustful, ugly ones cease toplease, and a chaste woman is as rare as a black swan

Shortly after Jean de Meun completed The Romance of the Rose, Mathéolus

penned his Lamentations, a long Latin diatribe against marriage translated into

French about a century later The Lamentations sum up medieval attitudes

toward women and provoked the important response by Christine de Pizan

in her Book of the City of Ladies.

In 1355, Giovanni Boccaccio wrote Il Corbaccio, another antifeminist

manifesto, although ironically by an author whose other works pioneerednew directions in Renaissance thought The former husband of his lover ap-pears to Boccaccio, condemning his unmoderated lust and detailing the de-fects of women Boccaccio concedes at the end “how much men naturallysurpass women in nobility” and is cured of his desires.3

3 Giovanni Boccaccio, The Corbaccio, or The Labyrinth of Love, trans and ed Anthony K Cassell,

rev ed (Binghamton, N.Y., 1993), 71.

W O M E N ’ S R O L E S : T H E F A M I LY.The negative perceptions of women pressed in the intellectual tradition are also implicit in the actual roles thatwomen played in European society Assigned to subordinate positions in thehousehold and the church, they were barred from significant participation inpublic life.

ex-Medieval European households, like those in antiquity and in Western civilizations, were headed by males It was the male serf (or peas-ant), feudal lord, town merchant, or citizen who was polled or taxed or suc-ceeded to an inheritance or had any acknowledged public role, although hiswife or widow could stand as a temporary surrogate From about 1100, theposition of property-holding males was further enhanced: inheritance wasconfined to the male, or agnate, line—with depressing consequences forwomen

non-A wife never fully belonged to her husband’s family, nor was she a ter to her father’s family She left her father’s house young to marry whomeverher parents chose Her dowry was managed by her husband, and at her death

daugh-it normally passed to her children by him

A married woman’s life was occupied nearly constantly with cycles ofpregnancy, childbearing, and lactation Women bore children through all theyears of their fertility, and many died in childbirth They were also respon-sible for raising young children up to six or seven In the propertied classesthat responsibility was shared, since it was common for a wet nurse to takeover breast-feeding and for servants to perform other chores

Women trained their daughters in the household duties appropriate totheir status, nearly always tasks associated with textiles: spinning, weaving,sewing, embroidering Their sons were sent out of the house as apprentices

or students, or their training was assumed by fathers in later childhood andadolescence On the death of her husband, a woman’s children became theresponsibility of his family She generally did not take “his” children with her

to a new marriage or back to her father’s house, except sometimes in the tisan classes

ar-Women also worked Rural peasants performed farm chores, merchantwives often practiced their husbands’ trades, the unmarried daughters of theurban poor worked as servants or prostitutes All wives produced or embel-lished textiles and did the housekeeping, while wealthy ones managed ser-vants These labors were unpaid or poorly paid but often contributed sub-stantially to family wealth

W O M E N ’ S R O L E S : T H E C H U R C H Membership in a household, whether

a father’s or a husband’s, meant for women a lifelong subordination to others

In western Europe, the Roman Catholic Church offered an alternative to thecareer of wife and mother A woman could enter a convent, parallel in func-tion to the monasteries for men that evolved in the early Christian centuries.

In the convent, a woman pledged herself to a celibate life, lived ing to strict community rules, and worshiped daily Often the convent of-fered training in Latin, allowing some women to become considerable schol-ars and authors as well as scribes, artists, and musicians For women whochose the conventual life, the benefits could be enormous, but for numerousothers placed in convents by paternal choice, the life could be restrictive andburdensome

accord-The conventual life declined as an alternative for women as the modernage approached Reformed monastic institutions resisted responsibility forrelated female orders The church increasingly restricted female institutionallife by insisting on closer male supervision

Women often sought other options Some joined the communities oflaywomen that sprang up spontaneously in the thirteenth century in theurban zones of western Europe, especially in Flanders and Italy Some joinedthe heretical movements that flourished in late medieval Christendom,whose anticlerical and often antifamily positions particularly appealed towomen In these communities, some women were acclaimed as “holywomen” or “saints,” whereas others often were condemned as frauds or her-etics

In all, although the options offered to women by the church were times less than satisfactory, they were sometimes richly rewarding After

some-1520, the convent remained an option only in Roman Catholic territories.Protestantism engendered an ideal of marriage as a heroic endeavor and ap-peared to place husband and wife on a more equal footing Sermons and trea-tises, however, still called for female subordination and obedience

T H E O T H E R V O I C E , 1 3 0 0 – 1 7 0 0

When the modern era opened, European culture was so firmly structured by

a framework of negative attitudes toward women that to dismantle it was amonumental labor The process began as part of a larger cultural movementthat entailed the critical reexamination of ideas inherited from the ancientand medieval past The humanists launched that critical reexamination

T H E H U M A N I S T F O U N D AT I O N Originating in Italy in the fourteenthcentury, humanism quickly became the dominant intellectual movement inEurope Spreading in the sixteenth century from Italy to the rest of Europe,

it fueled the literary, scientific, and philosophical movements of the era andlaid the basis for the eighteenth-century Enlightenment.

Humanists regarded the Scholastic philosophy of medieval universities

as out of touch with the realities of urban life They found in the rhetorical course of classical Rome a language adapted to civic life and public speech.They learned to read, speak, and write classical Latin and, eventually, classicalGreek They founded schools to teach others to do so, establishing the pat-tern for elementary and secondary education for the next three hundred years

dis-In the service of complex government bureaucracies, humanists ployed their skills to write eloquent letters, deliver public orations, and for-mulate public policy They developed new scripts for copying manuscriptsand used the new printing press to disseminate texts, for which they createdmethods of critical editing

em-Humanism was a movement led by males who accepted the evaluation

of women in ancient texts and generally shared the misogynist perceptions

of their culture (Female humanists, as we will see, did not.) Yet humanismalso opened the door to a reevaluation of the nature and capacity of women

By calling authors, texts, and ideas into question, it made possible the mental rereading of the whole intellectual tradition that was required inorder to free women from cultural prejudice and social subordination

funda-A D I F F E R E N T C I T Y.The other voice first appeared when, after so manycenturies, the accumulation of misogynist concepts evoked a response from

a capable female defender: Christine de Pizan (1365–1431) Introducing her

Book of the City of Ladies (1405), she described how she was affected by reading

Mathéolus’s Lamentations: “Just the sight of this book made me wonder how

it happened that so many different men are so inclined to express both inspeaking and in their treatises and writings so many wicked insults aboutwomen and their behavior.”4These statements impelled her to detest herself

“and the entire feminine sex, as though we were monstrosities in nature.”5The rest of The Book of the City of Ladies presents a justification of the fe-

male sex and a vision of an ideal community of women A pioneer, she has ceived the message of female inferiority and rejected it From the fourteenth

to the seventeenth century, a huge body of literature accumulated that sponded to the dominant tradition

re-The result was a literary explosion consisting of works by both men and

4 Christine de Pizan, The Book of the City of Ladies, trans Earl Jeffrey Richards, foreword by

Ma-rina Warner (New York, 1982), 1.1.1, pp 3–4.

5 Ibid., 1.1.1–2, p 5.

women, in Latin and in the vernaculars: works enumerating the achievements

of notable women; works rebutting the main accusations made againstwomen; works arguing for the equal education of men and women; worksdefining and redefining women’s proper role in the family, at court, in public;works describing women’s lives and experiences Recent monographs and ar-ticles have begun to hint at the great range of this movement, involving prob-ably several thousand titles The protofeminism of these “other voices” con-stitutes a significant fraction of the literary product of the early modern era

T H E C ATA L O G S About 1365, the same Boccaccio whose Corbaccio

re-hearses the usual charges against female nature wrote another work, ing Famous Women A humanist treatise drawing on classical texts, it praised

Concern-106 notable women: ninety-eight of them from pagan Greek and Roman tiquity, one (Eve) from the Bible, and seven from the medieval religious andcultural tradition; his book helped make all readers aware of a sex normallycondemned or forgotten Boccaccio’s outlook nevertheless was unfriendly towomen, for it singled out for praise those women who possessed the tradi-tional virtues of chastity, silence, and obedience Women who were active inthe public realm—for example, rulers and warriors—were depicted as usu-ally being lascivious and as suffering terrible punishments for entering themasculine sphere Women were his subject, but Boccaccio’s standard re-mained male

an-Christine de Pizan’s Book of the City of Ladies contains a second catalog, one

responding specifically to Boccaccio’s Whereas Boccaccio portrays femalevirtue as exceptional, she depicts it as universal Many women in history wereleaders, or remained chaste despite the lascivious approaches of men, or werevisionaries and brave martyrs

The work of Boccaccio inspired a series of catalogs of illustrious women

of the biblical, classical, Christian, and local pasts, among them Filippo daBergamo’s Of Illustrious Women, Pierre de Brantôme’s Lives of Illustrious Women,

Pierre Le Moyne’s Gallerie of Heroic Women, and Pietro Paolo de Ribera’s mortal Triumphs and Heroic Enterprises of 845 Women Whatever their embedded

Im-prejudices, these works drove home to the public the possibility of femaleexcellence

T H E D E B AT E At the same time, many questions remained: Could awoman be virtuous? Could she perform noteworthy deeds? Was she even,strictly speaking, of the same human species as men? These questions weredebated over four centuries, in French, German, Italian, Spanish, and En-glish, by authors male and female, among Catholics, Protestants, and Jews,

in ponderous volumes and breezy pamphlets The whole literary genre hasbeen called the querelle des femmes, the “woman question.”

The opening volley of this battle occurred in the first years of the teenth century, in a literary debate sparked by Christine de Pizan She ex-changed letters critical of Jean de Meun’s contribution to The Romance of the Rose with two French royal secretaries, Jean de Montreuil and Gontier Col.

fif-When the matter became public, Jean Gerson, one of Europe’s leading ologians, supported de Pizan’s arguments against de Meun, for the momentsilencing the opposition

the-The debate resurfaced repeatedly over the next two hundred years The Triumph of Women (1438) by Juan Rodríguez de la Camara (or Juan Rodríguez

del Padron) struck a new note by presenting arguments for the superiority ofwomen to men The Champion of Women (1440–42) by Martin Le Franc ad-

dresses once again the negative views of women presented in The Romance of the Rose and offers counterevidence of female virtue and achievement.

A cameo of the debate on women is included in The Courtier, one of the

most widely read books of the era, published by the Italian Baldassare tiglione in 1528 and immediately translated into other European vernaculars

Cas-The Courtier depicts a series of evenings at the court of the duke of Urbino in

which many men and some women of the highest social stratum amuse selves by discussing a range of literary and social issues The “woman ques-tion” is a pervasive theme throughout, and the third of its four books is de-voted entirely to that issue

them-In a verbal duel, Gasparo Pallavicino and Giuliano de’ Medici presentthe main claims of the two traditions Gasparo argues the innate inferiority

of women and their inclination to vice Only in bearing children do theyprofit the world Giuliano counters that women share the same spiritual andmental capacities as men and may excel in wisdom and action Men andwomen are of the same essence: just as no stone can be more perfectly a stonethan another, so no human being can be more perfectly human than others,whether male or female It was an astonishing assertion, boldly made to anaudience as large as all Europe

T H E T R E AT I S E S Humanism provided the materials for a positive terconcept to the misogyny embedded in Scholastic philosophy and law andinherited from the Greek, Roman, and Christian pasts A series of humanisttreatises on marriage and family, on education and deportment, and on thenature of women helped construct these new perspectives

coun-The works by Francesco Barbaro and Leon Battista Alberti—On Marriage

(1415) and On the Family (1434–37)—far from defending female equality,

re-asserted women’s responsibility for rearing children and managing the keeping while being obedient, chaste, and silent Nevertheless, they servedthe cause of reexamining the issue of women’s nature by placing domestic is-sues at the center of scholarly concern and reopening the pertinent classicaltexts In addition, Barbaro emphasized the companionate nature of marriageand the importance of a wife’s spiritual and mental qualities for the well-being

house-of the family

These themes reappear in later humanist works on marriage and the cation of women by Juan Luis Vives and Erasmus Both were moderatelysympathetic to the condition of women without reaching beyond the usualmasculine prescriptions for female behavior

edu-An outlook more favorable to women characterizes the nearly unknownwork In Praise of Women (ca 1487) by the Italian humanist Bartolommeo Gog-

gio In addition to providing a catalog of illustrious women, Goggio arguedthat male and female are the same in essence, but that women (reworking theAdam and Eve narrative from quite a new angle) are actually superior In thesame vein, the Italian humanist Maria Equicola asserted the spiritual equality

of men and women in On Women (1501) In 1525, Galeazzo Flavio Capra (or

Capella) published his work On the Excellence and Dignity of Women This

hu-manist tradition of treatises defending the worthiness of women culminates

in the work of Henricus Cornelius Agrippa On the Nobility and Preeminence of the Female Sex No work by a male humanist more succinctly or explicitly presents

the case for female dignity

T H E W I T C H B O O K S While humanists grappled with the issues ing to women and family, other learned men turned their attention to whatthey perceived as a very great problem: witches Witch-hunting manuals, ex-plorations of the witch phenomenon, and even defenses of witches are not atfirst glance pertinent to the tradition of the other voice But they do relate inthis way: most accused witches were women The hostility aroused by sup-posed witch activity is comparable to the hostility aroused by women Theevil deeds the victims of the hunt were charged with were exaggerations ofthe vices to which, many believed, all women were prone

pertain-The connection between the witch accusation and the hatred of women

is explicit in the notorious witch-hunting manual The Hammer of Witches (1486)

by two Dominican inquisitors, Heinrich Krämer and Jacob Sprenger Herethe inconstancy, deceitfulness, and lustfulness traditionally associated withwomen are depicted in exaggerated form as the core features of witch be-havior These traits inclined women to make a bargain with the devil—sealed

by sexual intercourse—by which they acquired unholy powers Such bizarre

claims, far from being rejected by rational men, were broadcast by tuals The German Ulrich Molitur, the Frenchman Nicolas Rémy, and theItalian Stefano Guazzo all coolly informed the public of sinister orgies andmidnight pacts with the devil The celebrated French jurist, historian, andpolitical philosopher Jean Bodin argued that because women were especiallyprone to diabolism, regular legal procedures could properly be suspended inorder to try those accused of this “exceptional crime.”

intellec-A few experts such as the physician Johann Weyer, a student ofAgrippa’s, raised their voices in protest In 1563, he explained the witch phe-nomenon thus, without discarding belief in diabolism: the devil deludedfoolish old women afflicted by melancholia, causing them to believe theyhad magical powers Weyer’s rational skepticism, which had good credibil-ity in the community of the learned, worked to revise the conventional views

of women and witchcraft

W O M E N ’ S W O R K S To the many categories of works produced on thequestion of women’s worth must be added nearly all works written bywomen A woman writing was in herself a statement of women’s claim to dig-nity

Only a few women wrote anything before the dawn of the modern era,for three reasons First, they rarely received the education that would enablethem to write Second, they were not admitted to the public roles—as ad-ministrator, bureaucrat, lawyer or notary, or university professor—in whichthey might gain knowledge of the kinds of things the literate public thoughtworth writing about Third, the culture imposed silence on women, consid-ering speaking out a form of unchastity Given these conditions, it is remark-able that any women wrote Those who did before the fourteenth centurywere almost always nuns or religious women whose isolation made their pro-nouncements more acceptable

From the fourteenth century on, the volume of women’s writings rose.Women continued to write devotional literature, although not always ascloistered nuns They also wrote diaries, often intended as keepsakes for theirchildren; books of advice to their sons and daughters; letters to family mem-bers and friends; and family memoirs, in a few cases elaborate enough to beconsidered histories

A few women wrote works directly concerning the “woman question,”and some of these, such as the humanists Isotta Nogarola, Cassandra Fedele,Laura Cereta, and Olympia Morata, were highly trained A few were profes-sional writers, living by the income of their pens; the very first among themwas Christine de Pizan, noteworthy in this context as in so many others In

addition to The Book of the City of Ladies and her critiques of The Romance of the Rose, she wrote The Treasure of the City of Ladies (a guide to social decorum for

women), an advice book for her son, much courtly verse, and a full-scale tory of the reign of King Charles V of France

his-W O M E N PAT R O N S Women who did not themselves write but aged others to do so boosted the development of an alternative tradition.Highly placed women patrons supported authors, artists, musicians, poets,and learned men Such patrons, drawn mostly from the Italian elites and thecourts of northern Europe, figure disproportionately as the dedicatees of theimportant works of early feminism

encour-For a start, it might be noted that the catalogs of Boccaccio and Alvaro

de Luna were dedicated to the Florentine noblewoman Andrea Acciaiuoliand to Doña María, first wife of King Juan II of Castile, while the Frenchtranslation of Boccaccio’s work was commissioned by Anne of Brittany, wife

of King Charles VIII of France The humanist treatises of Goggio, Equicola,Vives, and Agrippa were dedicated, respectively, to Eleanora of Aragon, wife

of Ercole I d’Este, Duke of Ferrara; to Margherita Cantelma of Mantua; toCatherine of Aragon, wife of King Henry VIII of England; and to Margaret,Duchess of Austria and regent of the Netherlands As late as 1696, MaryAstell’s Serious Proposal to the Ladies, for the Advancement of Their True and Greatest In- terest was dedicated to Princess Anne of Denmark.

These authors presumed that their efforts would be welcome to femalepatrons, or they may have written at the bidding of those patrons Silentthemselves, perhaps even unresponsive, these loftily placed women helpedshape the tradition of the other voice

T H E I S S U E S The literary forms and patterns in which the tradition ofthe other voice presented itself have now been sketched It remains to high-light the major issues around which this tradition crystallizes In brief, thereare four problems to which our authors return again and again, in plays andcatalogs, in verse and letters, in treatises and dialogues, in every language: theproblem of chastity, the problem of power, the problem of speech, and theproblem of knowledge Of these the greatest, preconditioning the others, isthe problem of chastity

T H E P R O B L E M O F C H A S T I T Y.In traditional European culture, as in those

of antiquity and others around the globe, chastity was perceived as woman’squintessential virtue—in contrast to courage, or generosity, or leadership, orrationality, seen as virtues characteristic of men Opponents of womencharged them with insatiable lust Women themselves and their defenders—

without disputing the validity of the standard—responded that women werecapable of chastity.

The requirement of chastity kept women at home, silenced them, lated them, left them in ignorance It was the source of all other impediments.Why was it so important to the society of men, of whom chastity was not re-quired, and who more often than not considered it their right to violate thechastity of any woman they encountered?

iso-Female chastity ensured the continuity of the male-headed household

If a man’s wife was not chaste, he could not be sure of the legitimacy of hisoffspring If they were not his and they acquired his property, it was not hishousehold, but some other man’s, that had endured If his daughter was notchaste, she could not be transferred to another man’s household as his wife,and he was dishonored

The whole system of the integrity of the household and the transmission

of property was bound up in female chastity Such a requirement pertainedonly to property-owning classes, of course Poor women could not expect tomaintain their chastity, least of all if they were in contact with high-statusmen to whom all women but those of their own household were prey

In Catholic Europe, the requirement of chastity was further buttressed

by moral and religious imperatives Original sin was inextricably linkedwith the sexual act Virginity was seen as heroic virtue, far more impressivethan, say, the avoidance of idleness or greed Monasticism, the cultural in-stitution that dominated medieval Europe for centuries, was grounded in therenunciation of the flesh The Catholic reform of the eleventh century im-posed a similar standard on all the clergy and a heightened awareness of sex-ual requirements on all the laity Although men were asked to be chaste, fe-male unchastity was much worse: it led to the devil, as Eve had led mankind

to sin

To such requirements, women and their defenders protested their cence Furthermore, following the example of holy women who had escapedthe requirements of family and sought the religious life, some women began

inno-to conceive of female communities as alternatives both inno-to family and inno-to thecloister Christine de Pizan’s city of ladies was such a community ModerataFonte and Mary Astell envisioned others The luxurious salons of the French

précieuses of the seventeenth century, or the comfortable English drawing

rooms of the next, may have been born of the same impulse Here womennot only might escape, if briefly, the subordinate position that life in thefamily entailed but might also make claims to power, exercise their capacityfor speech, and display their knowledge

T H E P R O B L E M O F P O W E R Women were excluded from power: thewhole cultural tradition insisted on it Only men were citizens, only menbore arms, only men could be chiefs or lords or kings There were exceptionsthat did not disprove the rule, when wives or widows or mothers took theplace of men, awaiting their return or the maturation of a male heir A womanwho attempted to rule in her own right was perceived as an anomaly, a mon-ster, at once a deformed woman and an insufficient male, sexually confusedand consequently unsafe.

The association of such images with women who held or sought powerexplains some otherwise odd features of early modern culture Queen Eliza-beth I of England, one of the few women to hold full regal authority in Eu-ropean history, played with such male/female images—positive ones, ofcourse—in representing herself to her subjects She was a prince, and manly,even though she was female She was also (she claimed) virginal, a conditionabsolutely essential if she was to avoid the attacks of her opponents Cather-ine de’ Medici, who ruled France as widow and regent for her sons, alsoadopted such imagery in defining her position She chose as one symbol thefigure of Artemisia, an androgynous ancient warrior-heroine who combined

a female persona with masculine powers

Power in a woman, without such sexual imagery, seems to have been digestible by the culture A rare note was struck by the Englishman SirThomas Elyot in his Defence of Good Women (1540), justifying both women’s

in-participation in civic life and their prowess in arms The old tune was sung bythe Scots reformer John Knox in his First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women (1558); for him rule by women, defects in nature, was a

hideous contradiction in terms

The confused sexuality of the imagery of female potency was not served for rulers Any woman who excelled was likely to be called an Ama-zon, recalling the self-mutilated warrior women of antiquity who repudiatedall men, gave up their sons, and raised only their daughters She was oftensaid to have “exceeded her sex” or to have possessed “masculine virtue”—asthe very fact of conspicuous excellence conferred masculinity even on the fe-male subject The catalogs of notable women often showed those femaleheroes dressed in armor, armed to the teeth, like men Amazonian heroinesromp through the epics of the age—Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso (1532) and

re-Spenser’s Faerie Queene (1590–1609) Excellence in a woman was perceived as

a claim for power, and power was reserved for the masculine realm A womanwho possessed either one was masculinized and lost title to her own femaleidentity

T H E P R O B L E M O F S P E E C H Just as power had a sexual dimension when itwas claimed by women, so did speech A good woman spoke little Excessivespeech was an indication of unchastity By speech, women seduced men Evehad lured Adam into sin by her speech Accused witches were commonly ac-cused of having spoken abusively, or irrationally, or simply too much As en-lightened a figure as Francesco Barbaro insisted on silence in a woman, which

he linked to her perfect unanimity with her husband’s will and her ished virtue (her chastity) Another Italian humanist, Leonardo Bruni, in ad-vising a noblewoman on her studies, barred her not from speech but frompublic speaking That was reserved for men

unblem-Related to the problem of speech was that of costume—another,

if silent, form of self-expression Assigned the task of pleasing men as theirprimary occupation, elite women often tended toward elaborate costume,hairdressing, and the use of cosmetics Clergy and secular moralists alikecondemned these practices The appropriate function of costume and adorn-ment was to announce the status of a woman’s husband or father Any furtherindulgence in adornment was akin to unchastity

T H E P R O B L E M O F K N O W L E D G E When the Italian noblewoman IsottaNogarola had begun to attain a reputation as a humanist, she was accused ofincest—a telling instance of the association of learning in women with un-chastity That chilling association inclined any woman who was educated todeny that she was or to make exaggerated claims of heroic chastity

If educated women were pursued with suspicions of sexual misconduct,women seeking an education faced an even more daunting obstacle: the as-sumption that women were by nature incapable of learning, that reasoning was

a particularly masculine ability Just as they proclaimed their chastity, womenand their defenders insisted on their capacity for learning The major work by

a male writer on female education—that by Juan Luis Vives, On the Education of

a Christian Woman (1523)—granted female capacity for intellection but still

ar-gued that a woman’s whole education was to be shaped around the requirement

of chastity and a future within the household Female writers of the followinggenerations—Marie de Gournay in France, Anna Maria van Schurman in Hol-land, and Mary Astell in England—began to envision other possibilities.The pioneers of female education were the Italian women humanistswho managed to attain a literacy in Latin and a knowledge of classical andChristian literature equivalent to that of prominent men Their works im-plicitly and explicitly raise questions about women’s social roles, definingproblems that beset women attempting to break out of the cultural limits thathad bound them Like Christine de Pizan, who achieved an advanced educa-

tion through her father’s tutoring and her own devices, their bold ing makes clear the importance of training Only when women were edu-cated to the same standard as male leaders would they be able to raise thatother voice and insist on their dignity as human beings morally, intellectu-ally, and legally equal to men.

question-T H E O question-T H E R V O I C E The other voice, a voice of protest, was mostly male, but it was also male It spoke in the vernaculars and in Latin, in treatisesand dialogues, in plays and poetry, in letters and diaries, and in pamphlets Itbattered at the wall of prejudice that encircled women and raised a bannerannouncing its claims The female was equal (or even superior) to the male

fe-in essential nature—moral, spiritual, and fe-intellectual Women were capable

of higher education, of holding positions of power and influence in the lic realm, and of speaking and writing persuasively The last bastion of mas-culine supremacy, centered on the notions of a woman’s primary domestic responsibility and the requirement of female chastity, was not as yet assaulted—although visions of productive female communities as alterna-tives to the family indicated an awareness of the problem

pub-During the period 1300–1700, the other voice remained only a voice,and one only dimly heard It did not result—yet—in an alteration of socialpatterns Indeed, to this day they have not entirely been altered Yet the callfor justice issued as long as six centuries ago by those writing in the tradition

of the other voice must be recognized as the source and origin of the maturefeminist tradition and of the realignment of social institutions accomplished

in the modern age

We thank the volume editors in this series, who responded with many gestions to an earlier draft of this introduction, making it a collaborative en-terprise Many of their suggestions and criticisms have resulted in revisions

sug-of this introduction, although we remain responsible for the final product

P R O J E C T E D T I T L E S I N T H E S E R I E S

Isabella Andreini, Mirtilla, edited and translated by Laura Stortoni

Tullia d’Aragona, Complete Poems and Letters, edited and translated by Julia Hairston

Tullia d’Aragona, The Wretch, Otherwise Known as Guerrino, edited and translated by

Julia Hairston and John McLucas

Francesco Barbaro et al., On Marriage and the Family, edited and translated by

Mar-garet L King

Francesco Buoninsegni and Arcangela Tarabotti, Menippean Satire: “Against Feminine travagance” and “Antisatire,” edited and translated by Elissa Weaver

Ex-Rosalba Carriera, Letters, Diaries, and Art, edited and translated by Catherine M Sama

Madame du Chatelet, Selected Works, edited by Judith Zinsser

Vittoria Colonna, Chiara Matraini, and Lucrezia Marinella, Marian Writings, edited

and translated by Susan Haskins

Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia, Correspondence with Descartes, edited and translated by

Lisa Shapiro

Isabella d’Este, Selected Letters, edited and translated by Deanna Shemek

Fairy-Tales by Seventeenth-Century French Women Writers, edited and translated by Lewis

Seifert and Domna C Stanton

Moderata Fonte, Floridoro, edited by Valeria Finucci and translated by Julia Kisacki

Moderata Fonte and Lucrezia Marinella, Religious Narratives, edited and translated by

Virginia Cox

Catharina Regina von Greiffenberg, Meditations on the Life of Christ, edited and

trans-lated by Lynne Tatlock

In Praise of Women: Italian Fifteenth-Century Defenses of Women, edited and translated by

Chiara Matraini, Selected Poetry and Prose, edited and translated by Elaine MacLachlan

Alessandro Piccolomini, Rethinking Marriage in Sixteenth-Century Italy, edited and

trans-lated by Letizia Panizza

Christine de Pizan, Debate over the “Romance of the Rose,” edited and translated by

David F Hult

Christine de Pizan, Life of Charles V, edited and translated by Nadia Margolis

Christine de Pizan, The Long Road of Learning, edited and translated by Andrea

Tarnowski

Oliva Sabuco, The New Philosophy: True Medicine, edited and translated by Gianna

Po-mata

Margherita Sarrocchi, La Scanderbeide, edited and translated by Rinaldina Russell

Gabrielle Suchon, “On Philosophy” and “On Morality,” edited and translated by Domna

Stanton with Rebecca Wilkin

Sara Copio Sullam, Sara Copio Sullam: Jewish Poet and Intellectual in Early Century Venice, edited and translated by Don Harrán

Seventeenth-Arcangela Tarabotti, Convent Life as Inferno: A Report, introduction and notes by

Francesca Medioli, translated by Letizia Panizza

Laura Terracina, Works, edited and translated by Michael Sherberg

I N T R O D U C T I O N

T H E O T H E R V O I C E

The Dames des Roches, mère et fille (mother and daughter), as they were

commonly called, rank among the best known and most prolific Frenchwomen writers of the sixteenth century Celebrated for their learning andtheir uncommon collaborative mother-daughter bond, they distinguishedthemselves for their bold assertion of women’s right to auctoritas (poetic

authority) in the realm of belles lettres At a time when few intellectual womenhad their writings printed, they took pride in counting themselves among thefew:1“whereas there are plenty of men who write,” asserts Catherine in herdedicatory letter to her mother, “there are few women who get involved insuch an exercise, and I’ve always desired to be counted among the few.”2Al-though aware of their exceptionality, they retained a heightened sense of acommon feminine condition, and their writings are suffused with an engagingfeminist consciousness They spent their entire lives in the southwestern city

of Poitiers where they belonged to an elite circle of members of the upper try and the nobility of the robe (lawyers and royal officials) There, together,they wrote and published three volumes of writings in a wide variety of gen-res including poems, translations of Latin and Italian works, letters, prose di-alogues, a pastoral drama, and a tragicomedy based on the biblical apocryphalstory of Tobias These volumes were published in the late 1570s and 1580swhen they had already attained celebrity status for their learning and their co-terie Among the first in France, their literary circle paved the way for the

flowering of the salon in the next century In continuous dialogue with eachother, with local and visiting members of their coterie, and with their times,they became astute political commentators: they addressed the issues of theirday, the ravages of the religious civil wars,3the necessity for greater justice andequity before the law,4the weak monarchy, women’s education, marriage andthe family, violence against women, and the status of female intellectuals.Through their collaborative engagement in shared public discourse, theDames des Roches modeled moral, political, and literary agency.

L I F E , W O R K S , A N D C O N T E X T

Little is known about Madeleine des Roches’s birth, childhood, and early life.5Born Madeleine Neveu into a bourgeois family of notaries ca 1520, she wassomehow fortunate enough to receive a good education She was marriedtwice First, in 1539, she married André Fradonnet, a procureur (public prose-

cutor) and the father of her three children, Nicolles, baptized on 17 March1540; Catherine, baptized on 15 December 1542; and Lucrèce, baptized on

3 The Dames des Roches lived through seven civil wars from the first in 1562–63 to the last during their lifetime in 1579–84 Iconoclastic vandalism and desecration of churches, summary executions, drownings and hangings, the pillage and desolation of the countryside, and the sieges of cities (including Poitiers) were daily occurrences during the wars Mother and daugh- ter became through necessity caustic observers of the chaos around them See Nicole Vray, La guerre des religions dans la France de l’Ouest Poitou, Aunis, Saintonge 1534–1610 (La Crèche: Geste Édi-

tions, 1997); R J Knecht, The French Civil Wars, 1562–1598 (London: Longman, 2000).

4 As active businesswomen buying land and houses, lending money, and collecting revenues, the Dames des Roches were frequently engaged in lawsuits against debtors Their letters and poems include numerous references to jurists, the law, and the restitution of personal property.

5 On the Dames des Roches’ lives and milieu, see George Diller, Les Dames des Roches Étude sur la vie littéraire à Poitiers dans la deuxième moitié du XVI esiècle (Paris: Droz, 1936); Anne R Larsen, “The French Humanist Scholars: Les Dames des Roches,” in Women Writers of the Renaissance and Reformation, ed.

Katharina Wilson (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987), 232–59; Tilde Sankovitch, French Women Writers and the Book: Myths of Access and Desire (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1988); Eve-

lyne Berriot-Salvadore, Les femmes dans la société française de la Renaissance (Geneva: Droz, 1990); Ann

Rosalind Jones, The Currency of Eros: Women’s Love Lyric in Europe, 1540–1620 (Bloomington: Indiana

University Press, 1990); Kirk Read, “French Renaissance Women Writers in Search of Community: Literary Constructions of Female Companionship in City, Family and Convent Louise Labé Li- onnoize, Madeleine and Catherine des Roches, mère et fille, Anne de Marquets, Sœur de Poissy” (Ph.D diss., Princeton University, 1991); Colette H Winn, “Mère/fille/femme/muse: maternité

et créativité dans les œuvres des Dames des Roches,” Travaux de Littérature 4 (1991): 53–68; Kendall

Tarte, “ ‘Mes Rochers hautains’: A Study of Madeleine and Catherine des Roches and the Culture

of Renaissance Poitiers” (Ph.D diss., University of Virginia, 1997); Madeleine Lazard, “Deux féministes poitevines au XVI e siècle: Les Dames des Roches,” in Joyeusement vivre et honnêtement penser Mélanges offerts à Madeleine Lazard Choix d’articles, ed Marie-Madeleine Fragonard and Gilbert

Schrenck (Paris: Champion, 2000), 267–79; Cathy Yandell, Carpe Corpus: Time and Gender in Early Modern France (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2000).

22 October 1547 Only Catherine survived infancy After Fradonnet died in

1547, Madeleine married three years later François Éboissard, seigneur de laVillée An advocat at the présidial (appeals court), originally from Brittany,

Éboissard was elected in the 1560s as one of the seventy-five bourgeois whomade up the municipal council at the city hall of Poitiers He was taxed at 50sols which represented a sufficient but not a great income.6Upon his deathfrom a pulmonary disease during the summer of 1578, Madeleine wrote amournful sonnet and an epitaph lauding his nobility, learning, and friendshipfor her.7In this striking epitaph, Madeleine’s deceased husband speaks mostlyabout her rather than himself in his representation of her as an irreproachablewidow.8It was upon the death of Éboissard that mother and daughter firstallowed their works to appear in print They adopted the quasi-noble name ofDes Roches taken from a family property, located some seven kilometers east

of Châtellerault, that Madeleine had inherited Going public with such a name highlighted their self-representation as members of a noble elite of let-ters whose modus vivendi they had adopted with the creation of their coterie.9

sur-E D U C AT I O N Madeleine des Roches’s education is a matter of lation She was a studious young woman, for in her first ode, collected andpublished with her other poems in Les Œuvres (1578–79), she admits her great

specu-disappointment at having to curtail her studies when she married She likely

6 François Éboissard’s income level can be compared with that of André Fradonnet, who was taxed at 7 sols In marrying maistre Éboissard, Madeleine achieved a comfortable living for her-

self and her daughter On the Des Roches’ finances, see Diller, Dames des Roches, 168–69; George

Huppert, Les Bourgeois Gentilshommes: An Essay on the Definition of Elites in Renaissance France (Chicago:

University of Chicago Press, 1977), 123.

7 Sonnet 1, Les Œuvres (1579), ed Anne R Larsen (Geneva: Droz, 1993), 174; Epitaph for Master François Éboissard, Lord of La Villée, her Husband (see chap 1) On the publication of the Des Roches’ Œuvres in 1578 and 1579, see below.

8 See Colette H Winn on this epitaph, “Écriture, veuvage et deuil Témoignages féminins du XVI e siècle,” in Veufs, veuves et veuvage dans la France d’Ancien Régime Actes du colloque de Poitiers (11–12 juin 1998), ed Colette Winn and Nicole Pellegrin (Paris: Champion, 2003), 293 Madeleine’s per-

sona as an inviolate widow reflects her knowledge of customary law that dictated that a widow could retain her douaire and administer alone her wealth on the condition that she led an exem-

plary life On widows and the law, see Jean-Marie Augustin, “La protection juridique de la veuve sous l’Ancien Régime,” in Veufs, veuves et veuvage dans la France d’Ancien Régime, 25–45.

9 Families that rose into the nobility of the robe often dropped the family name, substituting that of a fief; see Nancy Roelker, One King, One Faith The Parlement of Paris and the Religious Reforma- tions of the Sixteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 26 While Madeleine

continued to use her paternal surname Neveu in her (unpublished) correspondence, Catherine frequently signed only with the maternal surname Des Roches A transcription of a sample un- published letter by the mother and the daughter can be found in their Missives (1586), ed Anne

R Larsen (Geneva: Droz, 1999), 70–71.

benefited from the intellectual renewal and enthusiasm for poetry that turnedPoitiers into a cultural center from 1546 to 1554 The poètes du Clain (from the

Clain river passing through Poitiers) included long-term poets from Poitoulike Jean Salmon Macrin (1490–1557), Scévole de Sainte-Marthe (1536–1623) and Jean Boiceau de La Borderie (1513–91), as well as publishers andwriters Jacques Bouchet (1476–ca 1558) and Guillaume Bouchet (1514–92)and poets passing through Poitiers like Marc-Antoine Muret (1526–85), whostudied law and taught poetry at the university; Joachim du Bellay (1522–60); the philosopher-scientist Jacques Peletier du Mans (1517–82), whoresided in the city from 1549 to 1552; Jacques Tahureau (1527–55), who ar-rived in 1552; Jean-Antoine de Bạf (1532–89); and Jean Bastier de La Péruse(1529–54).10Madeleine probably continued learning in her spare time bymaking use of the private libraries of local lawyers and physicians, and cer-tainly that of her husband François Éboissard Such collections belonging toprofessionals, most notably jurists,11 would have contained many legalworks, the Church Fathers, works by humanist poets and writers such as Eras-mus, Boccaccio, Petrarch, and Ariosto, Plato’s works translated into Latin andinterpreted by Marsilio Ficino and Pico della Mirandola, the Greek and Latinpoets Hesiod, Horace, Ovid, and Virgil, and especially historians such asPlutarch, Herodotus, Sallust, Josephus, and Justin Both Catherine des Rochesand especially Madeleine des Roches establish their literary authority by cit-ing abundantly from these sources The humanist philologist Joseph-JusteScaliger (ca 1540–1609), who lived in Poitou for close to two decades(1574–93), recalls Madeleine in these terms:

Madame des Roches the mother, who knows more than Madame herdaughter, is more learned and has read and remembered more history,

in my estimation, than any Frenchman; and she converses as elegantly,effortlessly, and eloquently as is possible In short, she is the mostlearned person in Europe, among those who know only one language.12

10 On the école du Clain (school of the Clain), as it was called, see Alice Hulubei, L’éclogue en France

au XVI esiècle, 1515–1589 (Paris: Droz, 1938), chap 10; Trevor Peach, “Autour des Amours de Francine: quelques notes d’histoire littéraire,” Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance 44 (1982): 81–

95; Jean Brunel, Un poitevin poète, humaniste et soldat à l’époque des guerres de religion Nicolas Rapin (1539– 1608), 2 vols (Paris: Champion, 2002), vol 1, chap 4.

11 The most important libraries in Paris belonged to members of the legal profession and to wealthy merchants See Henry-Jean Martin, “What Parisians Read in the Sixteenth Century,” in

French Humanism, 1470–1600, ed Werner L Gundersheimer (New York: Harper, 1969), 134.

12 “Madame des Roches la mere, qui en sçait plus que Madame sa fille, est plus docte et a plus leu et retenu d’histoires, à mon jugement, qu’aucun François et parle autant proprement, facile- ment, et éloquemment qu’il est possible Bref c’est la plus docte personne, pour ne sçavoir qu’une langue, qui soit en l’Europe.” Prima Scaligerana (1595), 341, cited by Diller, Dames des Roches, 13.

Madeleine took charge of Catherine’s education Humanist pedagogylegitimized the authority of the mother in the care of infants and the young.Madeleine nursed her own daughter, thereby fulfilling the directives of hu-manist pediatric literature.13She took her responsibilities very seriously and

in matters of instruction was far more daring than the majority of mothers ofher social class While she adhered to humanist views on the centrality of themother’s role, she deliberately disregarded their strictly utilitarian goals Shedid not groom her daughter for marriage, the exclusive focus of the majority

of parents of the time for whom the merger of two families was an economicand political investment Instead, she inspired in Catherine a thirst for learn-ing coupled with an ambition for poetic fame She urges Catherine in herdedicatory Epistle to My Daughter (Œuvres) “to do your duty / Toward the Muse

and divine learning”14so that someday Catherine would become “immortal”through her “virtue.” Daughters of the upper gentry and urban nobility weresometimes sent to convent schools or more rarely tutored at home by a gov-erness or male instructors While likely home-tutored, Catherine was guidedand inspired primarily by her learned mother, to the awe of contemporarycommentators Scévole de Sainte-Marthe, a cousin of the Des Roches, ad-miringly describes “the mother instructing her daughter and speaking to her

of all the sciences with equal authority and ease.”15Catherine may have hadprivate tutors in Latin and Italian It seems highly improbable, however, thatshe would have known Greek She mastered Latin, even translating intoFrench alexandrine verse for the first time two complete Latin classical texts,Pythagoras’s Symbola (Symbols)16and Claudian’s De raptu Proserpinae (On the

The one language is presumably Latin (possibly, but less likely, Italian), since Madeleine’s native French would have been taken for granted.

13 In a sonnet of Les Œuvres of 1579 (see chap 1), Madeleine conjures her ill daughter to get

well soon “by [my] maternal love, by the sweet milk drawn from [my] breast, and [my] womb which bore you for nine months.” On the nursing of children urged upon mothers by humanist pedagogues, see for instance Erasmus, “The New Mother” (1526), in Erasmus on Women, ed Erika

Rummel (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996), 156–73; Juan Luis Vives, The Education of

a Christian Woman, ed and trans Charles Fantazzi, Other Voice in Early Modern Europe

(Chi-cago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 2.10.131; Berriot-Salvadore, Les Femmes dans la société française de la Renaissance, 82–90 For an analysis of this sonnet, see chap 1.

14 “Faire ton devoir / Envers la Muse et le divin sçavoir,” Epistle to My Daughter (see chap 1).

15 “La Mere instruire la fille, et luy parler de toutes les sciences avec autant de suffisance que de facilité.” Scévole de Sainte-Marthe, Éloges des hommes illustres, qui depuis un siecle ont fleury en France dans

la profession des Lettres Composez en Latin et mis en François, par G Colletet (Paris: Sommaville, 1644)

(original Latin edition in 1596), in “Les Éloges des Dames des Roches sous l’ancien régime,” in Des Roches, Missives, 361.

16.Les Secondes Œuvres, ed Anne R Larsen (Geneva: Droz, 1998), 127–42 Catherine also

pro-duced a French adaptation of Pythagoras’s Carmina aurea (Golden Verse), which had been translated

by Jean-Antoine de Bạf in 1574 and Barthélémy Fournier in 1577; see Secondes Œuvres, 122–26.

Rape of Proserpina).17In both adaptations, Catherine adds her own tive point of view, injecting a subjective tone into Pythagorean wisdom andGreco-Roman mythology.

distinc-L E G A distinc-L A N D F I N A N C I A distinc-L D I F F I C U distinc-LT I E SFrom 1560 into the 1570s, theDames des Roches encountered legal and financial challenges Madeleinerefers four times in Les Œuvres to a thirteen-year lawsuit and in her letters men-

tions other court cases related to uncollected rentes (government bonds) and

loans, as well as sales of properties As members of the elite, they invested inparcels of land, loans to individuals, and rentes that allowed them to loan

money at interest while helping to alleviate the royal debt Their incomefrom moneylending in the single year 1580–81 amounted to 551 livres 13sous 4 deniers (or 8 percent) for an invested capital of 6,618 livres The rev-enues from their landholdings on the other hand amounted to little morethan 66 livres a year.18

To these legal and financial concerns were added the iconoclastic sacking of Poitiers’s churches and monasteries by Protestant armies in May

ran-1562 and the siege of the city in 1569 by Admiral Gaspard de Coligny(1519–72) that led to the destruction of two of Madeleine’s houses on theoutskirts of the city In 1578, the year of her second widowhood, Madeleineincluded in her first volume of collected poems an outspoken request to KingHenri III for an indemnity for these properties that “may well have beenworth two thousand pounds, / More than the worth of my pen and my bookscombined.”19She was finally awarded a royal grant in February 1587, the year

of her death In odes 6 and 8 and a number of sonnets written during the1560s,20Madeleine reflects on the ravages of the civil wars, particularly inconnection with the attacks on Poitiers She criticizes the Protestants as trai-tors to family, country, and crown, invoking in ode 2 the patricide of Oedi-pus and the matricide of Orestes Her dramatic account of the 1569 siege ofPoitiers (ode 8), the only female-authored response to this event, highlightsincidents and heroic feats by various warriors, particularly the young Henri

de Guise (1550–88) These events are also described by contemporary torians, both Catholic and Protestant, such as Marin Liberge, François de

his-La Noue, his-Lancelot de his-La Popelinière, and Agrippa d’Aubigné Her

187-17. Missives, 212–87.

18 Diller, Dames des Roches, 174–75; Huppert, Bourgeois Gentilshommes, 123.

19 “Bien valoir deux mille livres, / Plus que ne m’ont valu ma plume ny mes livres” Au Roy (To

the King) (see chap 1).

20 Odes 6 and 8, Œuvres (1578–79); sonnets 15 to 20 (see chap 1).

alexandrine narrative epitaph on the death of Timoléon de Cossé, comte deBrissac, a favorite at the court of Charles IX, who was killed at the age oftwenty-six at the siege of Mussidan in Périgord on 28 April 1569, competesrhetorically with the outpouring of verse on this event by court and Pléiadepoets.21Replete with mythological, historical, and political citations, as well

as military references to celebrated battles fought by a host of century French nobles from François I, Henri II, and Henri III to the ducs deGuise (père and fils) and Antoine de Bourbon, king of Navarre, this epitaph cir-

sixteenth-culated widely and must have attained a certain celebrity for it was included

in a court manuscript collection.22In these and other instances such as hersonnets addressed to monarchs Charles IX and Henri III23and her unpub-lished poem to the Queen Mother Catherine de Médicis,24Madeleine desRoches entered public discourse as an astute political commentator and his-toriographer of her times Her skill at applying serious historical research tothe genre of epideictic verse enabled her to assert her agency on matters ofsocial and public concern

C O T E R I E A N D P U B L I C AT I O N S The Dames des Roches’ first tions appeared in the late 1570s after their literary coterie was established.Their house in Saint Michael’s parish, close to the cathedral Notre Dame laGrande, was well situated to welcome daily the visitors who came to theirhome Years later, Scévole de Sainte-Marthe recalled:

publica-The home of these two illustrious Ladies in Poitiers was an Academy ofhonor where daily there congregated a great many men of excellence

21 Examples include the collection Epitaphes et regrets sur le trespas de Monsieur Thimoleon de Cossé, Comte de Brissac (Paris: Gabriel Buon, 1569) that includes verse by Jean Dorat, Jean-Antoine de

Bạf, Scévole de Sainte-Marthe, Amadis Jamyn, and others; Philippe Desportes, Epitaphe de léon de Cossé, Comte de Brissac in Cartels et masquerades Epitaphes, ed Victor Graham (Geneva: Droz,

Timo-1958), 54; François de Belleforest, Deploration de la France, sur la mort de tres-hault et puissant Seigneur Timoleon de Cossé, comte de Brissac (Paris: Jean Hulpeau, 1569), and many others.

22. Épitaphe de feu Monsieur le Comte de Brissac, Œuvres (1578–79), 158–70 This poem appears in a

court album (BNF, Fonds français 22.563, fols 95–100).

23 Sonnets 10 to 14 (see chap 1).

24 This unpublished sonnet to Catherine de Médicis appears in an elegant court manuscript of

47 folios (BNF, ancien fonds français 862, fols 31–34) containing other poems by the Dames des Roches that were published in Les Œuvres The album, composed between 1578 and 1584, con-

tains poems to François d’Alençon (1554–84), King Henri III’s younger brother, and to other members of the royal family; many are written anonymously but several bear the names of court poets such as Philippe Desportes (1546–1606) and Jacques Davy du Perron (1556–1618) Sev- eral anonymous sonnets are addressed to Charite, Catherine des Roches’s coterie pseudonym.

On the transcription of the manuscript poems related to the Dames des Roches, see Diller, Dames des Roches, appendix 3.