Renaissance misogyny, biblical feminism, and Helisenne de Crenne's Epistres familieres et invectives

Renaissance Quarterly, Summer, 1997 by Jerry C. Nash

The feminist principle of reversal begins perforce with refuting and rejecting the dominant misogynist view of women's identity and female conduct, as Helisenne indicated above in her desire to "confondre le dire de son mary" ("to refute her husband's opinion"). She further explains in Epistre invective 3 the urgent need of such reversal:

Mais voyant que generallement tu deteste la femenine condition, m[']a semble que trop est grande l'injure, puis qu'elle est universelle. Et pource passant soubz silence, ce que je pourois respondre, a ce que particulierement tu me dis, Je donneray principe [je commenceray] a approuver [prouver] faulse l'accusation, que tu fais de noz malicieuses oeuvres. (I v-I [v.sup.v]: Seeing as how you loathe the whole feminine condition, however, it has seemed to me that your insult is particularly great because it is universal. I shall therefore be silent as to your accusations against me in particular and concentrate on refuting your incrimination of what you call our malevolent deeds.)

Reacting to, and therefore reversing, the misogynist "injure" and "accusation" was the necessary condition early modern women writers like Crenne found themselves in. As Joan Kelly so aptly describes the feminist response to Renaissance misogyny: "Caught up in opposition to misogyny, the feminists of the querelle remained bound by the terms of that dialectic. What they had to say to women and society was largely reactive to what misogynists said about women. Yet the way beyond that resistance had to lie through it . . . . To oppose misogyny was to initiate the long feminist struggle for women's full humanity and for the humanity of society as well."(11) This "struggle" was precisely Crenne's in the Epistres, which retell in a different literary form and depict even more passionately and polemically the same drama between husband and wife found in Crenne's widely read Les Angoysses douloureuses qui procedent d'amours, her first work published in 1538, one year before the Epistres.

To prove the misogynist assessment of woman's evil nature false, Crenne turns to the other side of the Bible, to its profeminist side, and to a different perspective that the Bible itself makes possible.(12) Helisenne's husband had avowed how "[les] femmes sont infideles, inconstantes, frauduleuses & deceptives" ("women are unfaithful, inconsistent, fraudulent and deceptive") and, therefore, "qui presteroit foy a [son] dire, nul en mariaige ne se lyeroit" (I [v.sup.v]: "if anyone were to believe what he says, no one would ever get married").(13) Man is therefore better off, it would seem, avoiding woman and marriage in particular. Helisenne strongly disagrees with this and will try to remonstrate with her husband. Turning to Paul, who is also used by other Renaissance evangelicals like Erasmus to praise woman and her place in marriage (Insitutio matrimonii christiani), Helisenne reminds her husband that the institution of marriage was divinely ordained as a very special relationship between man (husband) and woman (wife), like the one between Christ and the church: "l'escripture saincte a exprime l'estat de l'eglise [l'Eglise]: & choses ardues par cest etat de mariaige, appellant le redempteur l'espoux & l'eglise [l'Eglise] son espouse" (I [v.sup.v]: "Scripture has compared the state of the Church to the state of marriage, calling the Redeemer a bridegroom and the Church his bride"). Crenne is referring here to Ephesians 5:25-32, where the husband is urged to imitate Christ in conjugal love and respect: "Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her . . . . This mystery [the union of man and woman in marriage] is a profound one, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church."