Idle Pursuits: Literature and Oisiveté in the French Renaissance

Romanic Review, Jan 2005 by Lovell, Alison Baird

Although definitions of idleness shifted from the religious sphere, with its ideal of monastic contemplation, to the secular sphere with its feudal roots, still the moral commonplace flourished that idleness was dangerous because it led to vice, especially for women. Krause points out that while triviality and frivolity were closely related to the construction of "the feminine" during the Renaissance, at the same time, women were not supposed to be truly idle, as they might make trouble. "An idle woman," Krause writes, "was a form of currency in a male economy of honor" (p. 86). The idle aristocratic heroine of Les angoysses douloureuses defies this heavily moralized convention and indeed gets into trouble.

The terms leisure, loisir, licence, and licentiousness derive from the Latin verb licere, to be permitted: the author demonstrates how much this central principle informs our conception of leisure. Krause understandably does not discuss idleness in popular culture, such as the limited seasonal idleness imposed on farmers and peasants by the harvest cycle, which produced pastimes such as songs and games. Abundant leisure is available primarily to the upper class, which is not obligated to work to survive (and finds manual labor distasteful). Along with privilege and education, leisure brings choices, including those deemed by moralists to be evil or corrupt. Krause suggests that for Montaigne, leisure as contemplation, in terms of classical ethics, was superior for being an absolute end in itself, and not for serving some other purpose (p. 79). Thus instead of being useless or morally questionable, leisure becomes an exalted ideal, akin to virtue.

Krause's arguments on occasion become slightly confused, as for example during the discussion of the Amadis serial, when she claims that the romance genre occupied a humble place in the humanist curriculum (p. 127). I question whether romance had any place in the humanist curriculum; romances were printed and read and became popular, but the genre was not therefore endorsed as prestigious or worthwhile reading suitable for a curriculum, especially by humanists. Krause herself notes a few pages later that humanists, including Rabelais, reacted against such books as romances produced "for consumption" (p. 130). Another example is the rather extravagant claim made for "the founding myth of nobiliary idleness in the Roman de la Rose" (p. 28), as if the myth were nonexistent prior to the first part of that thirteenthcentury work. The discourse of Oiseuse is evidently a very important medieval articulation of nobiliary idleness, but a mythologized, idle, courtly aristocracy is found in Andréas Capellanus, Chrétien de Troyes and elsewhere. Furthermore, Jean Batany, whose excellent article, "Miniature, allégorie, idéologie : Oiseuse' et la mystique monacale récupérée par la 'classe de loisir,'" in Études sur le Roman de la Rosé (Paris: Champion, 1984, pp. 7-36), covered some of the same territory as Krause's book, mentioned earlier medieval texts rather than emphasizing the Oiseuse passage as being seminal for nobiliary idleness. Still concerning the Roman de la Rose, Krause wonders where the labor is done to produce the lovely attire that Oiseuse wears in the [enchanted] garden (p. 53). I would point out that the entire text of Guillaume de Lorris is a courtly dream sequence, and is not meant to be vraisemblable. Like Thélème which is a Utopia, both "places" are unreal, and the usual economic conditions of life do not apply to them. It is thus of limited use to assess the economics of labor in either text as if they were documents of social history.