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

Renaissance Quarterly, Summer, 1997 by Jerry C. Nash

Car je suis certaine que tune vouldroys estre du nombre d'aulcunes pusillanimes femmes: Mais au contraire, t'esforceras d'estre semblable a celle a qui la magnanime constance, fut occasion de changer son nom primitif, qui estoit Helisa: Mais subsequentement appellee fut Dido, qui en langaige Phenicien est interprete, & vault autant a dire comme Virago, exerceant oeuvres viriles: Certainement c'estoit celle que l'adverse fortune ne povoit aulcunement superer [surmonter]: Car a l'heure que icelle instable la vouloit totalement prosterner en permettant la mort immaturee de son fidele mary, Ceste Dido fist grande demonstrance de sa vertu . . . par elle fut construicte & edifiee la noble cite de Carthage: laquelle depuis fut tresfameuse & renomee. (D [iiii.sup.v]-D v: I am sure you will not wish to be counted in the number of faint-hearted women but rather will endeavor to imitate one whose steadfast endurance was her reason for changing her former name. I mean Helisa, subsequently called Dido, which in the Phoenician language means 'Virago,' one who exercises manly tasks. She was a woman whom adverse fortune was not at all able to defeat; just when fortune was attempting to crush her completely by sending her faithful husband to a premature death, Dido gave ample proof of her courage . . . by building the great city of Carthage, which since then has become so very famous.)

Crenne's classical and medieval sources for the virile Dido include Virgil (The Aeneid, I, IV), Ovid (Heroides, VII), Boccaccio (De claris mulieribus, XL), and Pizan (Cite des Dames, I, 46; II, 54; II, 55). The "manly" virtue of such heroines as Dido and Judith is a biblical as well as a classical concept, and one that denotes a type of person, male or female. Crenne develops for the early Renaissance the truly revolutionary feminist implications of the biblical admonition, "there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus" (Galatians 3:28). For Crenne, the accomplishment of "manly" or heroic works is not in relationship to gender but to individual ability and performance, in the sense of a single human nature and a single human activity. This virile nature, as some readers of the Bible such as Crenne knew, is thus one, both male and female, because it is of one and the same genesis or origin. Since man and woman were created from the same source, they may, equally, pursue the benefits of their creation. Of great importance to Crenne, I believe, and to our understanding of her portrayal of women as viragoes "exerceant oeuvres viriles" ("exercising manly tasks"), is precisely this story of creation, but not the one found in Genesis 2:21-22, whose misogynist interpretation Helisenne's husband, following the thinking of Du Pont and Matheolus, is so indebted to and obsessed with. Rather, it is the one found in Genesis 1:27, which I quote from the Vulgate version of the Bible: "Et creavit Deus hominem ad imaginem suam: ad imaginem Dei creavit ilium, masculum et feminam creavit eos" ("So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them").(16)