French Women and the Early Modern Canon: Recent Conferences, Editions, Monographs, and Translations

Renaissance Quarterly, Winter, 2000 by Anne R. Larsen

Philip Ford and Gillian Jondorf, eds. Women's Writing in the French Renaissance. Proceedings of the Fifth Cambridge French Renaissance Colloquium, 7-9 July 1997. (Cambridge French Colloquia.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. xii 243 pp. $20. ISBN: 0-95-116456-2.

Marie le Jars de Gournay. Preface to the Essays of Michel de Montaigne by his Adoptive Daughter, Marie le Jars de Gournay. Trans. Richard Hillman and Colette Quesnel. Tempe, AZ: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1998. 109 pp. $18. ISBN: 0-86698-235-3.

Louise Labe. Debate of Folly and Love: A New English Translation with the Original French Text. Foreword by Deborah Lesko Baker. Trans. Anne-Marie Bourbon. (History of Language, 8.) New York: Peter Lang, 2000. 165 pp. $48.95. ISBN: 0-8204-3752-2.

Jean de Marconville. De la bonte et mauvaistie des femmes. Ed. Richard A. Carr. Paris: Honore Champion, 2000. 235 pp. FFr 210. ISBN: 2-7453-0296-5.

Colette Nativel, ed. Femmes savantes, savoirs des femmes. Du crepuscule de la Renaissance a l'aube des Lumieres. Actes du Colloque de Chantilly (22-24 septembre 1995). Geneva: Droz, 1999. 268 pp. SFr 70. ISBN: 2-600-00334-7.

Marguerite de Navarre. The Coach and The Triumph of the Lamb. Trans. Hilda Dale with Simone de Reyff. Exeter: Elm Bank Publications, 1999. 142 pp. $29.95. ISBN: 1-902454-04-9.

Marguerite de Valois. Correspondance 1569-1614. Ed. Eliane Viennot. Paris: Honore Champion, 1998. 676 pp. FFr 550. ISBN: 2-85203-955-9.

Marguerite de Valois. Memories et autres ecrits, 1574-1614. Ed. Eliane Viennot. Paris: Honore Champion, 1999. 368 pp. FFr 320. ISBN: 2-7453-0263-9.

Kathleen Wilson-Chevalier and Eliane Viennot, eds. Royaume de femynie. Pouvoirs, contraintes, espaces de liberte des femmes, de la Renaissance a la Fronde. Paris: Honore Champion, 1999. 299 pp. SFr 34. ISBN: 2-7453-0289-2.

Cathy Yandell, Carpe Corpus. Time and Gender in Early Modern France. Newark, DE and Cranbury, NJ: University of Delaware Press, 2000. 281 pp. $43.50. ISBN: 0-87413-704-7.

The last few years have witnessed a dramatic rise in the number of interdisciplinary conferences and colloquia, monographs, articles, and doctoral dissertations on women in France in the early modern period. Paralleling this unprecedented increase in interest has been the inclusion in the canon of works by women hitherto neglected or unknown. Evelyne Berriot-Salvadore, whose 1990 influential work on women in Renaissance France ushered in the decade's flowering of studies, noted that of the one hundred or so women who wrote from 1497 to 1626, [1] thirty-five women authors appeared in print, and, of these, twenty had their writings published during their lifetime. [2] More recently, Susan Broomhall has uncovered writings by eighty-five women printed between 1488 and 1599 in France. [3] Several of these writers are benefitting today, some for the first time, from a resurgence of critical editions and translations. Yet much remains to be done. There are still poetic and prose works, letters, diaries, memoirs, and account-books by women buried in the archives.

RECENT CONFERENCES: FRENCH AND ANGLO-AMERICAN CONNECTIONS

The rediscovery of sixteenth-century French women writers emerged from the academic feminism of the 1960s and 70s. The initial surge of interest at that time came predominantly from Anglo-American scholarly communities, including those in Great Britain, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. In the past decade, however, fruitful collaborative exchanges with colleagues from French universities have been nourished by a series of bilingual interdisciplinary conferences. The first of these, "Women and Texts in Pre-Revolutionary France," held in Waterloo, Ontario, in 1993, was followed by three more: "Pre-Revolutionary Women Writers: Strategies of Emancipation," held in 1995 in Saint Louis, "Reflexion and Reflexivity in Texts by Pre-Revolutionary Women Writers," held in 1997 in Montreal, and "Pre-Revolutionary Women Writers, IV: Women and Cultural Change," held in 1999 in Charlottesville, Virginia. Each conference highlighted a particular thematics -- women as producers of texts, women's access to learning, reflexive and textual representations of women writing, and women and cultural movements; three of the conferences published proceedings. The next in the series will tentatively take place in France in 2002.

While the above conferences focus predominantly on women writers and the literary and para-literary genres they practiced, such as memoirs, letters, translations, and polemical and political pamphlets, the colloquia whose proceedings are contained in Royaume de femynie. Pouvoirs, contraintes, espaces de liberte des femmes, de la Renaissance a la Fronde and Femmes savantes, savoirs des femmes. Du crepuscule de la Renaissance a l'aube des Lumieres examine the flurry of debates in the early modern period around two central problematic issues: women and power and women and learning. Two emblematic sites were selected for these colloquia: the first on women and power was organized in October 1995 at the chateau of Blois where several Renaissance queens, Anne de Bretagne, Claude de France, and Catherine de Medicis held court; the second on women and learning took place in September 1995 near the chateau of Chantilly, reputed for its magnificent library. Both examine, as well, the lives of women from different socia l strata (from queens to commoners), religious backgrounds, and "professions" (writers, artists and musicians, merchants, political and religious women) so as to test normative texts against the social realities of the period. As the preface of Royaume de femynie eloquently puts it: "It is in the minutious exploration of particular cases, in the incessant comparison between what was said and what was done, in the ongoing contextualization of words and deeds, in the pinpointing of the latitude of maneuver accorded to women, in taking into account the allies and the enemies that women encountered on their paths, in the analysis of contradictions (social, economic, ideological, political, and personal), that lie the answers to the questions posed by scholars today" (11).