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

Renaissance Quarterly, Winter, 2000 by Anne R. Larsen

In chapter 3, Pernette du Guillet and Louise Labe are shown to reformulate the relationship between virtue and time, each proposing "a time of her own" (90). Time as perceived from within marriage (Nicole Estienne) and the convent (Anne de Marquets) -- the two main social institutions in which women were "enclosed" -- offers yet further insight into gendered temporal perceptions (chap. 4). In the final chapter, Yandell highlights the subtle undermining of mulier economica in Catherine des Roches's oeuvre. Even though Catherine makes a case for the "mixed life" in which traditional feminine work is allied with the humanist enterprise of writing, she favors the intellectual life above domesticity. To safeguard her independence, she deflects the erotic possibilities of the female body by rebuffing her literary suitors; she thereby empties the carpe diem topos of its emphasis on the aging body. In minimizing physical beauty and exalting the noble quality of "vertu" exemplified by the practice of reading and writ ing, Des Roches reconceptualizes the notion of women's time, reclaiming it "as an entity to be shaped. and exploited in the present" (211).

TRANSLATING FRENCH WOMEN WRITERS

In their introduction to the series The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe (University of Chicago Press), editors Margaret King and Albert Rabil note that the recent achievements of women today "have their origins in things women (and some male supporters) said for the first time about six hundred years ago." These things, mostly stated in languages other than English, are becoming accessible to anglophone students and scholars of women's history and literature for the first time. Projected titles in the series include several works by French women (and men) who first raised questions on female equality and opportunity. [9]

Marie de Gournay's 1595 Preface to Montaigne's Essais all but disappeared after its last publication in 1635. It was severed from post seventeenth-century editions of the Essais and stigmatized, along with its author, as "incoherent" and the product of mere apprenticeship. Yet, as its first-time translators Richard Hillman and Colette Quesnel make clear, it is precisely for its "vexed, sometimes vexatious, multivocal comprehensiveness" that it deserves to be read as a "watershed" piece, casting light on Gournay's writing and feminist commitment (3). Furthermore, the teleological reading that critics have tended to impose on Gournay, whereby her early works are dismissed in favor of her later "classical" writings, fails to convince her translators. To the contrary, the contradictions and excesses of the youthful Gournay are still present, albeit more diffuse, in her later writings. The contradictions in the 1995 Preface that have long puzzled critics originate, as Francois Rigolot first stated it, in the "dis cursive doubling" or conflicted relation between the "adoptive daughter" and her "father" Montaigne who authorized her "to speak for him, and not for her" (14). [10] The struggle to find her own voice is evidenced in the complex, dense, often convoluted language. This translation's great merit is to clarify the meaning of the original text. The helpful annotations include the revisions offered in later versions of the Preface.