Apology for the Woman Writing and Other Works

Renaissance Quarterly, Spring, 2004 by Diana Robin

Gournay's autobiography--her own Socratic Apologia--the Apology for the Woman Writing (1641) is by far her most original and idiosyncratic work. The Apology is above all about money and slander--a balance sheet of her needs (a female flute player, a chemistry lab) against her thrift in the face of the profligacy of her own family members. Of her deceased parents we learn only that her father, a man of noble forbears, died without debt while her mother left the family sunk in it. Her mother gave a married sister a large dowry, while she, Marie, became a self-made woman. She took out loans to pay off her mother's debts. She taught herself Greek and Latin, and she studied classical literature and philosophy. She, whom Michel de Montaigne designated his adoptive daughter and literary heir, spent the rest of her life embellishing his fame with her writings. Calling the autobiography a "howl of protest," the editors note that the dominant strains in the Apology are self-pity, rage, and vindictiveness, though with her often venomous misandry comes genuine social criticism.

One of the most telling passages in her autobiography deals with her involvement in alchemy, a precursor of experimental chemistry that required her to boil volatile substances in glass vessels over dangerously hot fires--a habit which subjected her to ridicule (though many royal households in Europe still retained alchemists in the seventeenth century). In Gournay's case her passion for alchemy seems paradigmatic of her will to dominate and test--in her life as well as in her literary inquiries--the supposed limits of nature itself.

The coordinating editors Virginia Walcott Beauchamp, Elizabeth Hageman, and Margaret Mikesell and their associates are to be praised for the quality, precision, and thoroughness of the critical edition they have produced of the editio princeps of Richard Hyrde's English translation of Juan Luis Vives's Instruction of a Christen Woman (1529). The volume includes a 103-page introduction on Vives's life, an appraisal of the Instruction as a sixteenth-century conduct book, a literary critique of Hyrde's translation and the work itself, a text history, and several appendices including: two lists of textual variants; a glossary of obsolete sixteenth-century words; and a second glossary explaining biblical and classical references in the work. The new edition largely retains, with very minor changes, the orthography and punctuation of the Berthelet's 1529 edition.

Vives's misogynistic treatise on women's education was certainly a "hit" in some circles, as the printing of five editions of Richard Hyrde's translation of the work in rapid succession suggests (1529a, 1529b, 1531, 1541, 1547). But we must also consider that another foreign import, Christine de Pizan's pro-woman The Boke of the Cyte of Ladyes (1521, trans. Brian Anslay) was welcomed with even more interest by the literary men of the Henrician court, as Jennifer Summit has recently observed (Lost Property: The Woman Writer and English Literary History, 1380-1589 [2000], 91).