Julie Campbell. Literary Circles and Gender in Early Modern Europe: A Cross-Cultural Approach

Seventeenth-Century News, Fall-Winter, 2007 by Lissa Beauchamp Desroches

Julie Campbell. Literary Circles and Gender in Early Modern Europe: A Cross-Cultural Approach. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2006. viii 221 pp. $89.95. Review by LISSA BEAUCHAMP DESROCHES, UNIVERSITY OF NEW BRUNSWICK, FREDERICTON.

Julie Campbell's study of how gender operates in the literary circles and salons of early modern Europe relies on a balance between genders as a matter of fact and gender as a matter for discourse. In other words, querelle discourse forms the basis for rhetorical and practical involvement in literary groups. Campbell's method treats a complex and interdependant series of influences, from late medieval Querelle des femmes to early modern Querelle des amyes, from Italy through France to England, and between actresses and courtesans and court ladies. Yet her examinations of texts and textual influences, even when focused on relatively obscure material, are always lucid and held together coherently.

Divided into six chapters, the book considers Italian, French, and English literary circles in turn, with two chapters for each regional culture. The first two chapters pair male- and female-authored texts in order to demonstrate the collaborative basis of literary circle authorship: Sperone Speroni and Tullia d'Aragona, and Tasso and Andreini, each represent various angles of querelle rhetoric in their discourses. These pairings also demonstrate how literary interaction worked through the contemporary questions of gender roles and representation as employed in the querelle rhetoric. In the third and fourth chapters, which examine French cultural contexts, Italian influences are clear: the salon of the Countess of Retz and the works of Louise Labe indicate how the late medieval Querelle des femmes extends into the Querelle des amyes, drawing the intellectual discourse of the woman question to bear on the behaviour of both men and women in love. As well, the "liminality between [French] court and [Italian] stage" fosters flexibility for female roles in cultured society, providing women with positive and useful exempla (86-87). In the fifth and sixth chapters, the Protestant influences on the Sidney circle, presided over by the Countess of Pembroke, concentrate on questions of gendered virtue in querelle discourse, as considered by Sidney himself, Lady Mary Wroth, Shakespeare, and others in a variety of pastoral works, closet dramas, and public theatre. Not only does the scope of gender widen to include the behaviour of men as well as women in love, but also the notion of female virtue as chastity shifts to incorporate that of constancy, which had previously been identified as a masculine virtue in querelle rhetoric. Again, too, the liminality of stage and court in England (albeit in a somewhat more domestic and private sense of "court" in the noble houses) suggests interesting connections between the concerns of intellectual and public communities. The Sidney circle's Senecan-style tragedies, for instance, like Othello, tend to focus on a woman oppressed by misogyny as a central figure, to "affirm by the very intensity of ... grieving the value of what is lost" (Campbell qtg. Linda Woodbridge, 157). As well, Campbell's discussion of the various Cleopatras of the period, both in public and closet drama, is intriguing in its suggestion that authorship is inscribed in dying well (163), much like Shakespeare's Lucrece, whose suicide, after publishing the details of her rape, serves to re-assert and mythologize her self-determined value rather than simply to cover her shame.

Throughout her various discussions, Campbell manages to reiterate the importance of female discourse regarding gender, their own as well as men's, as an important element of ongoing intellectual and cultural debates, without ever sounding repetitive. This persistent reminder implies that it is not only despite misogynistic attitudes, but perhaps also because of them, that such female discourse is even possible, since a querelle, or quarrel, by its very nature requires an oppositional or antagonistic dynamic. Especially where Campbell pairs male- and female-authored works, this dynamic is clearly beneficial for the female writers to make use of-and the pairings work as well for Campbell herself, as she draws out the interdependent concerns and nuances of querelle rhetoric more precisely than if she had focussed on women's works only. For instance, her exploration of the ongoing "body-speech link," in which male authors associate female speech/writing with a particularly sexual availability, is interesting and evocative, in that her discussion goes on to show how women could use this otherwise oppressive problem to their advantage: while this Petrarchan notion does contribute to preventing women like Retz from publishing their works, it also renders the notion of privacy as a quality of femininity. Thus when Labe publishes her work, she is careful to assert her female identity as, ironically, a performance of privacy (101-103). Just as Labe's alternative to the praise/blame rhetoric of the woman question addresses love rather than kinds of lovers (115), her publication addresses authorship rather than kinds of authors.