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

Philip Ford and Gillian Jondorf, eds. Women's Writing in the French Renaissance. Proceedings of the Fifth Cambridge French Renaissance Colloquium, 7-9 July 1997. (Cambridge French Colloquia.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. xii + 243 pp. $20. ISBN: 0-95-116456-2.

Marie le Jars de Gournay. Preface to the Essays of Michel de Montaigne by his Adoptive Daughter, Marie le Jars de Gournay. Trans. Richard Hillman and Colette Quesnel. Tempe, AZ: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1998. 109 pp. $18. ISBN: 0-86698-235-3.

Louise Labe. Debate of Folly and Love: A New English Translation with the Original French Text. Foreword by Deborah Lesko Baker. Trans. Anne-Marie Bourbon. (History of Language, 8.) New York: Peter Lang, 2000. 165 pp. $48.95. ISBN: 0-8204-3752-2.

Jean de Marconville. De la bonte et mauvaistie des femmes. Ed. Richard A. Carr. Paris: Honore Champion, 2000. 235 pp. FFr 210. ISBN: 2-7453-0296-5.

Colette Nativel, ed. Femmes savantes, savoirs des femmes. Du crepuscule de la Renaissance a l'aube des Lumieres. Actes du Colloque de Chantilly (22-24 septembre 1995). Geneva: Droz, 1999. 268 pp. SFr 70. ISBN: 2-600-00334-7.

Marguerite de Navarre. The Coach and The Triumph of the Lamb. Trans. Hilda Dale with Simone de Reyff. Exeter: Elm Bank Publications, 1999. 142 pp. $29.95. ISBN: 1-902454-04-9.

Marguerite de Valois. Correspondance 1569-1614. Ed. Eliane Viennot. Paris: Honore Champion, 1998. 676 pp. FFr 550. ISBN: 2-85203-955-9.

Marguerite de Valois. Memories et autres ecrits, 1574-1614. Ed. Eliane Viennot. Paris: Honore Champion, 1999. 368 pp. FFr 320. ISBN: 2-7453-0263-9.

Kathleen Wilson-Chevalier and Eliane Viennot, eds. Royaume de femynie. Pouvoirs, contraintes, espaces de liberte des femmes, de la Renaissance a la Fronde. Paris: Honore Champion, 1999. 299 pp. SFr 34. ISBN: 2-7453-0289-2.

Cathy Yandell, Carpe Corpus. Time and Gender in Early Modern France. Newark, DE and Cranbury, NJ: University of Delaware Press, 2000. 281 pp. $43.50. ISBN: 0-87413-704-7.

The last few years have witnessed a dramatic rise in the number of interdisciplinary conferences and colloquia, monographs, articles, and doctoral dissertations on women in France in the early modern period. Paralleling this unprecedented increase in interest has been the inclusion in the canon of works by women hitherto neglected or unknown. Evelyne Berriot-Salvadore, whose 1990 influential work on women in Renaissance France ushered in the decade's flowering of studies, noted that of the one hundred or so women who wrote from 1497 to 1626, [1] thirty-five women authors appeared in print, and, of these, twenty had their writings published during their lifetime. [2] More recently, Susan Broomhall has uncovered writings by eighty-five women printed between 1488 and 1599 in France. [3] Several of these writers are benefitting today, some for the first time, from a resurgence of critical editions and translations. Yet much remains to be done. There are still poetic and prose works, letters, diaries, memoirs, and account-books by women buried in the archives.

RECENT CONFERENCES: FRENCH AND ANGLO-AMERICAN CONNECTIONS

The rediscovery of sixteenth-century French women writers emerged from the academic feminism of the 1960s and 70s. The initial surge of interest at that time came predominantly from Anglo-American scholarly communities, including those in Great Britain, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. In the past decade, however, fruitful collaborative exchanges with colleagues from French universities have been nourished by a series of bilingual interdisciplinary conferences. The first of these, "Women and Texts in Pre-Revolutionary France," held in Waterloo, Ontario, in 1993, was followed by three more: "Pre-Revolutionary Women Writers: Strategies of Emancipation," held in 1995 in Saint Louis, "Reflexion and Reflexivity in Texts by Pre-Revolutionary Women Writers," held in 1997 in Montreal, and "Pre-Revolutionary Women Writers, IV: Women and Cultural Change," held in 1999 in Charlottesville, Virginia. Each conference highlighted a particular thematics -- women as producers of texts, women's access to learning, reflexive and textual representations of women writing, and women and cultural movements; three of the conferences published proceedings. The next in the series will tentatively take place in France in 2002.

While the above conferences focus predominantly on women writers and the literary and para-literary genres they practiced, such as memoirs, letters, translations, and polemical and political pamphlets, the colloquia whose proceedings are contained in Royaume de femynie. Pouvoirs, contraintes, espaces de liberte des femmes, de la Renaissance a la Fronde and Femmes savantes, savoirs des femmes. Du crepuscule de la Renaissance a l'aube des Lumieres examine the flurry of debates in the early modern period around two central problematic issues: women and power and women and learning. Two emblematic sites were selected for these colloquia: the first on women and power was organized in October 1995 at the chateau of Blois where several Renaissance queens, Anne de Bretagne, Claude de France, and Catherine de Medicis held court; the second on women and learning took place in September 1995 near the chateau of Chantilly, reputed for its magnificent library. Both examine, as well, the lives of women from different socia l strata (from queens to commoners), religious backgrounds, and "professions" (writers, artists and musicians, merchants, political and religious women) so as to test normative texts against the social realities of the period. As the preface of Royaume de femynie eloquently puts it: "It is in the minutious exploration of particular cases, in the incessant comparison between what was said and what was done, in the ongoing contextualization of words and deeds, in the pinpointing of the latitude of maneuver accorded to women, in taking into account the allies and the enemies that women encountered on their paths, in the analysis of contradictions (social, economic, ideological, political, and personal), that lie the answers to the questions posed by scholars today" (11).

The dominant question, one that feminist critic Toni Moi aptly posed in the mid 1980s, is: how did women manage to write, create, govern, and produce at all, given the strictures imposed upon them in normative texts? [4] Both collections answer by examining the gaps in patriarchal ideology, the loopholes as it were, that allowed women to negotiate their ways through the maze of interdictions. Scholars thus uncover specific ways in which women exploited the limited rights afforded them by various institutional systems. In Femmes savantes, for instance, C. Biet examines the case of a widow who skillfully used both her lawyers and the relative freedoms afforded to widows by law to win her case. D. Haase-Dubosc, in Royaume de femynie, shows how the more liberal applications of jurisprudence frequently contravened the severity of matrimonial laws, provided that the interests of the family as a whole were not at stake. Verifying how these laws were applied thus enables one to avoid the pitfalls of a triumphalist o r a "miserabilist" view of the history of women (60).

The first part of Royaume defimynie, entitled "Espaces de liberte" (Room for Maneuver), investigates how several women used their talents to assert their "pouvoir de faire" (power to act) alongside men: in M. Lazard's study, Jacquette de Montbron, Brantome's sister-in-law, devoted her architectural skills to design a new castle alongside the old family dwelling in Bourdeille; M. McKinley discusses Marie Dentiere's campaign to allow women to preach, and H. Fournier shows how Marie de Gournay gained public recognition as a translator of the auctores of Antiquity, including one of the greatest, Horace.

Both collections describe the successes but also profound ambiguities and sometimes insurmountable difficulties that women faced. In the second part of Royaume de femynie, entitled "Exercices du pouvoir" (Exercising Power), S. Berriere examines how four regents during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, Louise de Savoie, Catherine de Medicis, Anne d'Autriche, and Marie de Medicis, although politically handicapped by the Salic Law, used their influence and patronage to promote causes and individuals dear to them. Louise de Savoie, in M. Orch's study, used the early printed book and the art of miniature to publicize the notion that her young son, the future Francois [I.sup.er], should be the one and only heir to the French throne. Marie de Medicis, according to G. Johnson, exploited the rhetoric of visual art (albeit with mixed results) to reconcile her political ambitions with her duty to submit as wife and mother. Wifely submission, whether that of queens or of commoners, was the sine qua non of f emale virtue in the law courts of the period. As D. Nolde points our, women accused of murdering their husbands were judged primarily on the evidence of whether or not they were submissive to them, not on whether they were victims of domestic violence and so had to retaliate to save their own lives. Another queen, Marguerite de Valois, the ertswhile wife of Henry IV who was exiled for twenty years in her castle of Usson in Auvergne, negotiated with consummate skill and daring the terms of her loss of power. E. Viennot shows how Marguerite de Valois maneuvered her way back to Paris in 1605 where she became the well-loved and respected "Reine Marguerite." In one instance, women exercised legitimate power over men: the nuns of the royal abbey of Fontevraud, founded in 1100 by Robert d'Arbrissel, a Breton priest, were accorded jurisdiction over the monks attached to their convent; M. Melot notes that the latter tried repeatedly to free themselves from the abbesses' power, to no avail.

In the second part of Femmes savantes, savoirs des femmes, entitled "Regards d'hommes" (The Male Gaze), male perceptions of learned women combine both an admiring, but frequently ambivalent, gaze with contemptuous, often condemning judgement. J. Ceard examines these mixed signals in four Renaissance catalogues of mulieres doctae, those of Baptiste Fulgose, Coelius Rhodiginus, Barthelemy Chasseneuz, and Ravisius Textor: while these popularize the new notion of the learned woman, they show as well how difficult it was to separate her in both writers' and readers' minds from her normative roles as wife and mother. B. Hosington points out that in English humanist elogia, Protestant polemical portraits, and panegyrics by poets of learned women written between 1550 and 1558, the educated woman was admired "provided she was virtuous" and did not transgress normative social roles (106). Women on the fringes, however, "witches" (in N.-J. Chaquin's analysis of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century demonology) and mystics (in S. Houdard's study), were viewed with suspicion since their knowledge put them in direct connection with the divine, enabling them to bypass male control. Still other learned women, on the other hand, became partners in conversation and in writing with male intellectuals: the extraordinary correspondence of twenty-five year old princess Elizabeth of Bohemia with the older Descartes is Ph.J. Salazar's subject of inquiry, and J.-Ch. Darmon examines La Fontaine's praise of Mme. de la Sabliere.

How did these women, the majority from the nobility and upper middle-classes, gain access to learning when formal educational opportunities were reserved solely for boys and men? What channels and sites of learning enabled them to involve themselves in programs of study? A considerable number of monographs and collections of essays have analysed the different sites open to women: salons and coteries, courts, convents, the printing industry, and the family (fathers, brothers, tutors, at times mothers) all facilitated the learning of daughters. In the first part of Femmes savantes, entitled "Realites/Savoirs" (Realities/Learning), the ways in which women gained access to knowledge are explored. In her analysis of seventeenth-century female novelists' "primary education," N. Grande notes that since women did not attend religious schools and were excluded from the colleges and universities, they were dependent on the salons where, as young women, they befriended learned male writers who became their tutors; these men corresponded with them, corrected their faulty spelling, lent them books, and directed them toward a modern rather than a classical, Latin-based curriculum. S. Juratic studies the family environment as the principal venue by which widows of Parisian booksellers learned their trade. According to P. Marechaux, convents, long reputed for teaching girls the art of musical composition, instrumentation, and song, produced musicians who were admired and highly respected.

Although the university held its doors shut to women, a few seventeenth- and eighteenth-century women managed, against all odds, to earn doctoral degrees and even to teach. B. Neveu's article "Doctrix et Magistra" retraces the trajectories of several Venetian and Bolognese women such as Elena Cornaro Piscopia, Maria Delfini Dossi, Laura Bassi, Maria Gaetana Agnesi, and Maria Amoretti di Melglia; in Germany, Dorothea Erxleben and Dorothea Schlozer earned doctorates in 1754 and 1787. Clearly these were a tiny minority. The majority of educated women sought not to enter the male bastions of higher education but the opportunity to read, write, and study. Yet to aspire to such freedom was to raise suspicion. C. Winn examines the rhetorical strategies that learned women used in their self-defense in apologetic genres such as the invective, the declamation and the refutation, the treatise and the essay. Winn notes that in these texts women camouflage their demands as they struggle to be taken seriously.

The final section of Femmes savantes, entitled "Discours de femmes/Portraits" (Women's Words/Portraits), addresses the nature and applications of the learning of individual women: Marguerite de Valois, in E. Viennot's study, displays an "aristocratic culture" whose witty, unpedantic esthetic is meant to persuade, "never to demonstrate that she was learned, which she already knew she was" (175); similarly for Madeleine de Scudery, according to C. Morlet-Chantalat, learning was a means to please, not an end in itself. Further revealing studies on the novelist Mme. de Villedieu (by R. Demoris), the classical translator Mme. Dacier (by E. Bury), the mystic Jeanne Guyon (by R. Heyndels), the miniaturist Catherine Perrot (by E. Lavezzi), and the journalist Mme. du Noyer (by H. Goldwyn) shed light on the range and diversity of women's contributions.

The possibility of the reversal of sexual roles was never far from the early modern imagination filled with tales of contentious women, Amazons, and the Androgyne. How these figures played into Renaissance and seventeenth-century written and iconographical texts is the subject of the last part of Royaume de femynie. E. Nicholson concludes that the wives of conjugal farces who trespass the boundaries of sexual definition expose the abuses of power within the patriarchal order. These farces were thus condemned by moralists and the Paris Parliament because they gave occasion to "contest the status quo" (162). S. Beguin's study of the enigmatic sexual inversions in the iconography of Fontainebleau leads her to analyse these as hidden references to female members of the royal family, and K. Wilson-Chevalier underscores in her study of the iconography of the private bedroom of the Duchesse d'Etampes, Francois [I.sup.er]'s last reigning mistress, the king's admiration for and use of his lady to further his matrimoni al designs. For F. Villemur, the "ruse" of the Androgyne in Renaissance literature inevitably leads to a narcissistic, reduced image of woman, whereas the imagery of the Amazon, in S. Steinberg's study, presents a valorizing positive discourse that developed into seventeenth-century versions of strong, capable women. Finally, E. Hyde presents an intriguing analysis of the way in which Louis XIV "colonized" the world of flowers in various court ballets to assert his power over women's sexuality.

The conference proceedings Women's Writing in the French Renaissance originates from the fifth Cambridge French Renaissance colloquium held in July 1997. Like its continental version, La Femme lettree a la Renaissance/De geleerde vrouw in de Renaissance held at the Free University of Brussels in March 1996, [5] it focuses on the problematic of the learned woman as a writing figure contending with speech on the one hand and silence as a woman's lot on the other. Several articles indicate the question marks that still hang over the lives and works of several Renaissance women writers. Major events in Gabrielle de Bourbon's life have been identified -- thanks in part to E. Berriot-Salvadore's recent edition of her Oeuvres spirituelles 1510-1516 (Champion, 1999) -- but her education cannot be deduced from her three unpublished religious works written just prior to the Reformation. J. Britnell explores the theological assumptions underlying the writings of this laywoman, who paradoxically reveals a deep nostalgia for the religious life. The name, even the sex, of Jeanne Flore, have yet to be determined, as critics go back and forth on the question of the identity of this writer whose name appears on the cover of the Comptes amoureux (The Amorous Tales), the earliest work of prose fiction in sixteenth-century France. To those who contend that this pseudonym likely hides a misogynist male, even several male contributors to the tales, E. Tyler argues instead that Jeanne Flore, as woman, offers a negative stereotypical portrayal of her female characters so as to illustrate the bigotry of Renaissance society.

Yet another, somewhat shadowy figure is Marie Le Gendre, Dame de Rivery, to whom two slender volumes of stoic essays and moral reflexions are attributed, L'Exercice de l'ame vertueuse (The Exercise of the Virtuous Soul [1596-1597]) and Le Cabinet des saines affections (The Chamber of Wholesome Affections [1595]). Le Gendre's authorship of an earlier version of Des saines affections is still in dispute today. L. Warner explores its complex publishing history and reception, querying "how we can know so little about a woman writer who had a tremendous success in print" (221). One thing, however, becomes clear: Marie Le Gendre owes little to Montaigne; on the contrary, "perhaps we should consider Montaigne and Du Vair in the shadow of the author of the Saines affections" (236). C. Winn examines the differences between Montaigne's and Le Gendre's Stoicism, but notes its failure in Le Gendre's works to deal with suffering upon the death of a loved one. Two recently edited devotional writers, Anne de Marquets and Ga brielle de Coignard, are better known to us today. G. Ferguson investigates how their adoption of the Pleiade's "sweet style" later influenced Saint Francois de Sales. Their strong female exemplars and feminine topoi led as well to a "feminization" of devotion in the seventeenth century.

The remaining three writers discussed -- Helisenne de Crenne, Marguerite de Navarre, and Louise Labe -- have been edited and translated, as well as the subject of numerous studies. J. O'Brien treats Helisenne de Crenne's Angoysses douloureuses qui procedent d'amours (The Torments of Love) as a work of witness and memory. M. McKinley finds in Marguerite de Navarre's Heptameron traces of its own creation, noting that Marguerite was part of a collaborative team of contributors to the tales. G. Sharpling draws attention to the instabilities of representation in the Heptameron by focusing on its visual imagery, and L. Guild discusses the ethical impasses faced by the devisants, particularly over rape and violence; speech here fails to provide any resolution to the conflicts. Finally, Louise Labe is the focus of four articles. This high number reflects the enormous interest in Labe -- the MLA Bibliography records some 140 entries since the 1960s. Clearly, there will soon be a need for an annotated, cross-referenced bibliography surveying the scholarship on this major Renaissance writer. Labe's notoriety is the starting point for F. Rigolot's and D. Martin's studies: both investigate the sixteenth-century origins of the "phenomene Labe," the former by placing her in her lyonnais context, the latter by examining the marketing of Louise Labe by the literary community of Lyons. J. Braybrook's and J. Sproxton's analyses of the Debat de Folie et d'Amour (The Debate of Folly and Love) underscore for the former Labe's deceptive uses of language in the moral and legal spheres, and for the latter the poet's incisive account of the effects of passion on the human psyche. Finally, after tracing the evolution of the figure of the exemplary mother and Roman matron, Cornelia, in Renaissance catalogues of women worthies, as well as writings by women, G. Mathieu-Castellani locates her as intertext in Louise Labes provocative dedicatory epistle to her Euvres: there Labe displays "with ostentation her writings instead of jewels instead o f children, choosing to engender differently" (186).

EDITING FRENCH WOMEN WRITERS

Two publishing firms have taken the lion's share in critical editions of Renaissance French women writers: Droz in Geneva and Champion in Paris. Droz's Textes Litteraires Francais series has long included editions of texts by a few better known early modern women. Champion's new series, Textes de la Renaissance, under the direction of Claude Blum, as well as its sub-series, "Education feminine de la Renaissance a l age classique," directed by Colette Winn, now include six critical editions of women writers, all since 1996, with more in press. [6]

One of the most interesting cases of the reassessment and "historical resurrection," as Cl.-G. Dubois puts it, [7] of a queen only too well known to scandal mongerers is Marguerite de Valois. Dubbed "La Reine Margot" in Alexander Dumas's novel by that title and in Patrice Chereau's 1994 film version, her name has come to mean little more than "a lady of many loves." Eliane Viennot, in her magisterial Marguerite de Valois. Histoire d'une femme, histoire d'un mythe (Marguerite de Valois. The History of a Woman, The History of a Myth [1993]), sets the record straight by reappraising her subject's multi-faceted contributions as femme d'Etat, writer, salon hostess, and patron of the arts. Viennot has now edited for the first time, in two vol-times, Marguerite de Valois's complete works. Memories et autres ecrits 1574-1614 includes the queen's three prose works and her poetry. The first of these, the Memoire justificatif, was written in 1574 in defense of Henry de Navarre, the future Henri IV, in the failed conspi racy of the Malcontents gathered around the queen's younger brother the Duc d'Alencon. This piece, in which Marguerite impersonates her husband, reveals her rhetorical skill in the genre of the defense and contains in germ the makings of her autobiography. Her famous memoirs, the first by a woman in France, were published some thirteen years after her death, while her Discours docte et subtil, a brief letter sent to a Jesuit Father with whom she discussed the worth of women, is the only work published during her lifetime. The surprising element here is that Marguerite, who all her life had identified with male exemplary figures and preoccupations, becomes interested at the end of her life in defending women. Viennot attributes this dramatic change to the profound moral transformation that occurred in the queen after her divorce in 1599.

Eliane Viennot's edition of the totality of what has been preserved of Marguerite de Valois's letters -- 469 in all -- is a work of painstaking and admirable historical restitution. To the 330 letters found in some forty different publications, Viennot adds 117 new letters, as well as the twenty-two which she had published earlier. Three quarters of the letters are autograph, which ensures textual reliability and offers important insights into the queen's writing habits. In the absence of dates on half of the letters, Viennot consulted external documents to gauge their chronology. Unlike previous editors who modernized the text, she retains for the new letters the original spelling and punctuation, primarily so as to underscore the different styles and registers the queen used in her epistolary relations with her various correspondents. The queen's simple and coherent, phonetically-based spelling is influenced by the orthographic system of Pelletier du Mans. For instance, she always uses an for the nasal vow el (including the preposition en). She uses throughout the implosive s, as in "mesme," "mestre," "ceste," "dessir" (desir), "esmer" (aimer), and so forth. It is important to note that only the 117 new letters retain their original orthography; the rest are modernized. The effect, although a little jarring at times, allows the queen's voice to be heard in its original form.

Written over a forty-nine year period between 1569 and 1614, these letters shed light on historical and court events that transpired under four different sovereigns (Catherine de Medicics, Henri III, Henri IV, and Marie de Medicis). Over half are addressed to French and foreign heads of state (Catherine de Medicis, Henri III, Henri IV, Philip II, Elisabeth Ist, the Medicis), secretaries of state (Bellievre, Matignon, Villeroy), as well as members of princely families (Conde, Guise, Montmorency, Nevers), a third to close friends influential in cultural and political events of the period (the duchesses d'Uzes and de Nevers, Brantomre), and the rest to clients and domestics of the queen's house. Several letters record the evolution of the queens sentiments for members of her immediate family, her mother, her brothers Henri III and Alencon. Viennot examines in a nuanced manner the queen's letters to her lovers, Champvallon and Fouquevaux. The dominant subjects of the letters range from affairs of state to episod es in the queen's life, to the management of her affairs and properties.

Richard Carr's edition of Jean de Marconville is an important contribution to furthering our understanding of the Renaissance debate on women that extended and amplified the late medieval Querelle des femmes. Defenders and detractors of women relied mostly on conventional rhetorical tropes, repetition of themes, motifs, and allusions to various authorities. Critics agree by and large that writers sought mostly to display their rhetorical skill or their wit and learning or to pay homage to a female patron. At the same time, one should take note of innovation because this literature is dynamic. For R. Carr, Marconville's text reveals a certain originality: it recasts the traditional catalogue of famous women into a new frame, that of the "histoire prodigieuse" (the prodigious tale) popularized in the second half of the sixteenth century by Pierre Boaistuau, Francois de Belleforest, and Ambroise Pare. Marconville's interest in famous women is due largely to the "marvellous," "monstrous," or "memorable" nature o f their deeds. The speaker's intent is not to moralize but to lead the reader to marvell and/or recoil in horror at the deed. Carr thus concludes that "traditional condemnation has no more place [here], and the Querelle des fammes becomes therefore nonsensical" (21). Perhaps, but the dedicatory epistle to Jacqueline Courtain, Dame de Loyselet, one of the three daughters of Jacques Courtin, a neighboring friend of Marconville, calls into question the purely "esthetic" dimension of the tales. Marconville urges his female addressee to pursue virtue - "vertu" and its synonyms are repeated some seven times in his brief epistle--and avoid the vices depicted by his exemplary figures; she must spend her time wisely so as never to regret "having wasted it" (32). Not coincidentally, the two longest chapters in the book catalogue chaste and lustful women.

WOMEN, TIME, AND GENDER IN EARLY MODERN FRANCE

Monographs on individual Renaissance French women writers have begun to appear in significant numbers in the last few years. [8] Cathy Yandell's Carpe Corpus. Time and Gender in Early Modern France investigates the concept of time in the works of Ronsard and of five woman poets, four of them grouped in pairs -- Pernette du Guillet and Louise Labe, Anne de Marquets and Nicole Estienne -- while Catherine des Roches's works are the subject of an entire chapter. This study skillfully combines two critical approaches: a cultural and anthropological approach to the philosophical, psychological, and moral attitudes toward "temporal ideology" in the early modern period; and a study of gendered attitudes toward time. For Yandell, time in the sixteenth century is a gendered phenomenon. The female body figures prominently in discourses about time, from its poetic representation as a flower to be plucked (carpe corpus) to its connection with female morality in conduct books. However, our (impoverished) canonical reading of this theme is based solely on male wrirers' conception of time as an enemy to be vanquished and transcended. Women poets, argues Yandell, offer very different views.

Just how different these views are emerges from the first chapter's analysis on Renaissance beliefs about time. Sixteenth-century culture (like our own) was obsessed with how best to spend one's time: how to organize ones day, when to marry, when to work or play. Men were perceived as "investors of time," women as "wasters of time" (32). The passage of time was recorded especially in its effects on the female body. The abundant grotesque descriptions of old women suggest that male poets displaced their anxiety of aging onto the woman's body. In their use of the carpe diem topos, they asserted that the loss of her beauty is woman's greatest fear. One of the surprises of this study is that this fear is largely "suggested or planted by men" (45). None of the women poets discussed expresses anxiety over her own passing beauty; to the contrary, they reject the male insistence on female beauty as a marker of value. In C. Yandell's words, "instead, these women poets devote themselves to such pursuits as promoting l iterary involvement by women, advocating a particular theological perspective, criticizing the institution of marriage as it existed in early modern France, or contemplating and recording the vicissitudes of love" (45). A second major difference lies in male and female poets' treatment of the temporal topos of exegi monumentum. Male poets attempt to triumph over time through literary immortality; for women poets, the present takes precedence over the future.

The remainder of this rich and elegant book develops these central insights of women poets' difference in relation to time. This difference is measured against Ronsard's treatment of time (chap. 2): Ronsard's poet triumphs over time by rhetorically mastering his female addressee's aging body. In a striking interpretive move, Yandell notes that Ronsard's female addressees function as a "body double" whereby the poet's aging body is substituted for the beloved's body, her youth becomes his and his aging becomes hers: "Cassandre, Janne, and Helene, all consigned at some point to a shriveled future within the poet's verses, function for Ronsard's speaker as his doubles, and their bodies enact the aging that the poet so forcefully dreads for himself' (82).

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.

Unlike most early modern French women whose works are still in need of being edited and translated, Marguerite de Navarre's writings have benefited from both. Four of her works have been translated -- The Heptameron in 1984 (P. Chilton), The Prisons in 1989 (H. Dale), seven of her secular plays in 1992 (R. Reynolds-Cornell), and The Mirror of the Sinful Soul in 2000 (M. Gregg). The Coach (written ca. 1541) and The Triumph of the Lamb (ca. 1540, first published in 1547) are strongly contrasted poetic works: the first deals with the human heart's inability to attain perfect love as set forth by neoplatonism and courtly love; the second is an affirmative statement of belief in and celebration of the ascension of Christ whose new law of love triumphs over the Old Testament law. In The Coach, the queen's speaker is present throughout and her personality guides the action; The Triumph of the Lamb, on the other hand, is universal in scope as it contemplates humanity under God. Enlightening introductions by Hilda Da le for The Coach and Simone de Reyff for The Triumph make these short works accessible to undergraduate students.

Three previous published translations of Louise Labes Debate of Folly and Love lead one to query: why another one at this time? Deborah Lesko Baker in her foreword and translator Anne-Marie Bourbon note that translations become outmoded and need revision, particularly if they contain errors in the translation itself or if the notes are unhelpful. Translations need to be updated to incorporate new scholarship and new critical editions that continue to improve our understanding of the original text. Bourbon's dual-language format for both Labs's dedicatory epistle to Clemence de Bourges and Debate achieves a laudable balance between faithfulness to the original French and current idiomatic English. Bourbon has modernized the punctuation and included paragraph divisions but has retained as much as possible Labes vocabulary and imagery. The introduction does a good job of situating the text in its social, historical, and rhetorical contexts.

What findings will the current recovery and reassessment of French women's writings bring in this new century? Literary historian Susan Broom-hall lists close to 150 works written by eighty-five French women in the sixteenth century These writings include entire works published by women, printed manuscript works, and works to which women contributed -- this last category incorporates poetry in collectively authored texts, and marginal writings such as prefaces and editorial forewords that are contributions to works written by another author. Clearly, the ongoing recovery of these writings will entail further study of the socio-historic and economic aspects of women's production, women's participation in the polemical and political debates of the century, the impact of print and manuscript circulation, female court and urban patronage, the subjects and genres women chose -- letters, spiritual meditations, pamphlets, prefaces, songes -- still too often relegated to the "non-literary." The recent conferences, e ditions, monographs, and translations are an invigorating portent of developments to come.

(1.) The earliest edition of Christine de Pizan's Tresor tie la cite des dames was printed in 1497; Marie de Gournay's L'Ombre de la damoiselle de Gournay (Paris, 1626) had two further printings in 1634 and in 1641 under the title Les Advis, ou les Presens de la Demoiselle de Gournay. All translations in this review are my own.

(2.) Evelyne Berriot-Salvadore, "La problematique histoire des textes feminins," Atlantis 19 (1993): 9. Put another way, of the forty-six names of women that appear in Francois La Croix Du Maine's Bibliotheque (Paris, 1584), only fifteen appear in print, while thirty-one are said to have left their writings in manuscript form; see Berriot-Salvadore, Les Femmes dans la societe francaise de la Renaissance (Geneva, 1990), 362.

(3.) The very first printed work by a woman in France is Pizan's translation Lart de chevalerie selon Vegece (Paris: Antoine Verard, 1488); see Susan Broomhall, "French Women in Print, 1488 to 1599," Bibliographical Society of Australia and New Zealand Bulletin 22 (1998): 195-231.

(4.) Toril Moi, in Sexuall Textual Politics (London and New York, Methuen, 1985), asks: "How did women manage to write at all, given the relentless patriarchal indoctrination that surrounded them from the moment they were born?" and suggests that "only a sophisticated account of the contradictory, fragmentary nature of patriarchal ideology" can help provide an answer (64).

(5.) The Brussels conference proceedings, under the same title as the conference, were edited by Michel Bastiaensen (Bruxelles: Peeters, 1997).

(6.) Other publishers have produced facsimile editions, such as Scholars' Facsimiles and Reprints in Delmar, New York, or Core-femmes Editions in Paris, which publishes lightly-annotated versions of texts with brief prefaces.

(7.) C1.-G. Dubois, "Preface" to the conference proceedings Marguerite de France, Reine de Navarre et son temps. Actes du colloque d'Agen (12-13 octobre 1991), ed. M. Lazard and J. Cubelier de Beynac (Centre Matteo Bandello d'Agen, 1994), 10.

(8.) Louise Labe, for example, has been the focus of three monographs since 1996: Deborah Lesko Baker, The Subject of Desire. Petrarchan Poetics and the Female Voice in Louise Labe (1996), Francois Rigolot, Louise Labe Lyonnaise, ou la Renaissance au feminin (1997), and Daniel Martin, Signe(s) d'Amante. L'agentement des Euvres de Louize Labe Lionnoize (1999).

(9.) These include, so far, Christine de Pizan's debate over the Romance of the Rose, Marie Dentiere's epistles and History of the Deliverance of Geneva by Protestants, Marie de Gournay's Equality of Men and Women, Francois de La Barre's Equality of the Sexes and Education of Women, selections from the works of the Dames des Roches, and Madeleine de Scudery's orations and rhetorical dialogues.

(10.) The base text of the translation is Francois Rigolot's 1989 edition and annotation of the 1995 Preface, published in Montaigne Studies, vol. 1.