Shouting down Abraham: how sixteenth century Huguenot Women found their voice

Renaissance Quarterly, Summer, 1997 by Catharine Randall

The cultural context of the times played an additional role in determining the expression of Huguenot women, for there were all too few women writers of the French Renaissance, as we know. Tilde Sankovitch, working with the Des Roches sisters' literary production, asserts that "the reticence of women poets in the French Renaissance stems not from that supposedly innate feminine modesty, but from the problems posed for women authors by their desire for poetic creation and their need for poetic legitimacy."(10) The religious strictures placed on those women who went over to the Reform further hampered their self-expression. John Thompson, in his study John Calvin and the Daughters of Sara, has attempted to counter the perception that Calvin was a stern misogynist. However, while Thompson is able to show more latitude in Calvin's reading of woman's responsibility for sin in such biblical stories as that of the Fall, Thompson is less than convincing in making a case that Calvin and his contemporaries actively encouraged women's vocal involvement or assertions.(11) Calvin condemned at least one potentially powerful Calvinist woman, the Genevan writer and street preacher Marie Dentiere, calling her a madwoman and berating her for her attempts to proclaim her vision - a woman's vision - of the Gospel, this despite the fact that she was uniformly supportive of the Calvinist hierarchy, and that her creedal statements remained orthodox in the Calvinist sense? Nonetheless, despite such factors as the denigration of women contained in John Knox's First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women, for instance, elsewhere in Europe, and in England in particular, we find a plethora of Protestant women writers during the period of the Reformation, women like Margaret Roper who kept journals, wrote psalmic meditations, or penned theater or poetry.(13)

So the case of Calvinist France warrants special examination.(14) What was it about the Huguenot dilemma that caused such intense resistance to female expression? How, specifically, were these constraints imposed? When Huguenot women did write, how did they legitimize their speech? What did they have to say for themselves? And, finally, what influence did they have on succeeding generations?

The scope of this essay does not permit me to fully explore all the issues raised here. However, I can begin to suggest possible responses to all of the questions posed, in the hope that others will turn their focus to the intriguing case of the Huguenot woman writer.(15) In this essay, I will examine how a Huguenot male writer, Agrippa d'Aubigne, viewed female possibilities in order to demonstrate the sorts of constraints and resistances that Huguenot women writers eventually had to circumvent. I use the term "circumvent" because in many ways their approach was circular and roundabout. Their endeavor was, literally, a paraphrase. Skirting the issue of the chasm between Scripture and speech, they followed textual evasive tactics that enabled them to cloak their words in ostensible respectability, while applying biblical pronouncements in a new way: one that reconfigured divine mandates in a domestic, familiar, quotidian sense, thereby resituating authority from the husband's prayer-chair to the housewife's hearth.(16) In this context, the genre paintings created by northern European Protestants of the time, in which the kitchen table became the "new altar" and the women tending the hearth substituted for statues of the Blessed Mother, show how popularizing and Protestantizing revisions of iconography worked to exalt the role of the woman who functions within this domestic space. With this in mind, I will further illustrate the panoply of strategies exercised by one Huguenot woman writer, Charlotte de Mornay. Writing in the shadow of her famous husband, Philippe Du Plessis Mornay, the diplomat, ardent Calvinist, and onetime intimate of Henri IV, Charlotte found a way to make her presence the sole and absolutely essential conduit for the perpetuation of his memory, thereby necessitating her own speech. Finally, I offer some suggestions as to how Huguenot women writers found their voice in sixteenth-century France and Switzerland.