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

Renaissance Quarterly, Winter, 2000 by Anne R. Larsen

EDITING FRENCH WOMEN WRITERS

Two publishing firms have taken the lion's share in critical editions of Renaissance French women writers: Droz in Geneva and Champion in Paris. Droz's Textes Litteraires Francais series has long included editions of texts by a few better known early modern women. Champion's new series, Textes de la Renaissance, under the direction of Claude Blum, as well as its sub-series, "Education feminine de la Renaissance a l age classique," directed by Colette Winn, now include six critical editions of women writers, all since 1996, with more in press. [6]

One of the most interesting cases of the reassessment and "historical resurrection," as Cl.-G. Dubois puts it, [7] of a queen only too well known to scandal mongerers is Marguerite de Valois. Dubbed "La Reine Margot" in Alexander Dumas's novel by that title and in Patrice Chereau's 1994 film version, her name has come to mean little more than "a lady of many loves." Eliane Viennot, in her magisterial Marguerite de Valois. Histoire d'une femme, histoire d'un mythe (Marguerite de Valois. The History of a Woman, The History of a Myth [1993]), sets the record straight by reappraising her subject's multi-faceted contributions as femme d'Etat, writer, salon hostess, and patron of the arts. Viennot has now edited for the first time, in two vol-times, Marguerite de Valois's complete works. Memories et autres ecrits 1574-1614 includes the queen's three prose works and her poetry. The first of these, the Memoire justificatif, was written in 1574 in defense of Henry de Navarre, the future Henri IV, in the failed conspi racy of the Malcontents gathered around the queen's younger brother the Duc d'Alencon. This piece, in which Marguerite impersonates her husband, reveals her rhetorical skill in the genre of the defense and contains in germ the makings of her autobiography. Her famous memoirs, the first by a woman in France, were published some thirteen years after her death, while her Discours docte et subtil, a brief letter sent to a Jesuit Father with whom she discussed the worth of women, is the only work published during her lifetime. The surprising element here is that Marguerite, who all her life had identified with male exemplary figures and preoccupations, becomes interested at the end of her life in defending women. Viennot attributes this dramatic change to the profound moral transformation that occurred in the queen after her divorce in 1599.

Eliane Viennot's edition of the totality of what has been preserved of Marguerite de Valois's letters -- 469 in all -- is a work of painstaking and admirable historical restitution. To the 330 letters found in some forty different publications, Viennot adds 117 new letters, as well as the twenty-two which she had published earlier. Three quarters of the letters are autograph, which ensures textual reliability and offers important insights into the queen's writing habits. In the absence of dates on half of the letters, Viennot consulted external documents to gauge their chronology. Unlike previous editors who modernized the text, she retains for the new letters the original spelling and punctuation, primarily so as to underscore the different styles and registers the queen used in her epistolary relations with her various correspondents. The queen's simple and coherent, phonetically-based spelling is influenced by the orthographic system of Pelletier du Mans. For instance, she always uses an for the nasal vow el (including the preposition en). She uses throughout the implosive s, as in "mesme," "mestre," "ceste," "dessir" (desir), "esmer" (aimer), and so forth. It is important to note that only the 117 new letters retain their original orthography; the rest are modernized. The effect, although a little jarring at times, allows the queen's voice to be heard in its original form.