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

Il fit sa confession de foi avouant qu'il avoit beaucoup renu et peu profite. Et comme on lui repondait qu'il avoit fidelement employe son talent: "Eh! qu'y a-t-il du mien?" s'ecria-t-il. "ne dites pas moi, mais Dieu par moi."

- Philippe Du Piessis Mornay, on his deathbed, 1623

The strange case of French Calvinist women writers poses one of the more puzzling questions that scholars face in their efforts to reanimate the lost or silenced voices of early modern women. The pool of possibilities for the examination of these Huguenot writers is paltry, due to many factors, all of which obstruct a clear hearing of their voices. Admittedly, since women writers are relatively rare in sixteenth-century Calvinism, there is an inevitable temptation to stretch meager evidence too far. However, those few Calvinist women who did assert themselves literarily did so in pronounced ways that show the process of writing behind the content conveyed, demonstrating the active nature of the female stylist's contribution to the Calvinist literary scene. Jean-Pierre Faye theorizes narrative in a way consonant with the sorts of writing that we can see in Huguenot women writers. He avers that "because history is consummated only by being narrated, a critique of history may be practiced only as a narrative about how history, in narrating itself, is accomplished."(1) Thus, Calvinist women writers blow away the smoke screen of their male colleagues: for example, when Charlotte de Mornay talks about her famous husband, Philippe, it is she, rather than he, who is actually creating history precisely because she uses him as a pretext for narrative, and narrative allows for a critique of dominant ideologies written and perceived from the margins (woman's traditional place and, now, her triumphant recourse). In this essay, I shall examine a uniquely literary expression that is generally elitist in form and conception. The reasons for this approach are obvious: the few Huguenot writers available to us were well-educated, highly-placed women of their time. This argument is not intended to supplant a more broad-based analysis built upon a social historian's perception of problematic aspects inherent in Calvinist expression, but simply to offer one side of a many-faceted issue. If nothing else, my approach is faithful to that implemented by Charlotte de Mornay herself, who although occasionally expressing concern about other Huguenots in general, remained wedded to a focus on her "great man" husband as the window through which events are to be portrayed, understood and recorded.(2)

Calvinist male writers already faced certain obstacles to their self-expression, when John Calvin established the stylus rudus, or the plain style, as normative for a writer's expression. Such stylistic and thematic strictness resulted in an often slavish conformity to the contours of the biblical word, since nothing individual could be added to it, and no liberties could be taken with the model text) Calvin's successor, Theodore Beza, was even more rigorous as he renounced his lovely, humanist, and pre-libertine collection of Poemata and stubbornly subordinated the vagaries of his self and his speech to the divine Word.(4) In Abraham sacrifiant, a play that explicates the biblical story of the sacrifice of Isaac, Beza explicitly makes a burnt offering of his own self-expression and roundly criticizes Pleiade writers such as Ronsard and Du Bellay for pagan and ungodly writing.(5) Scholars have documented this uneasiness regarding literary creation among male Calvinist writers.(6) Nevertheless, writers such as Agrippa d'Aubigne and Beroalde de Verville devised strategies to write about themselves, even while insisting on their adherence to a theological system that rejected the self as an obstruction of, or a diversion from, the necessary and salutary focus on the divine. Possessing larger public roles, these men had the ambition and the ability to live with this ambiguity and to write through it.

Such does not appear to have been the case for women writers of the confession. They remained hampered, on the whole, by narrowly-defined gender roles and scripturally-mandated, subservient, silenced status. Thus the stern patriarchy of the Calvinist household, dubbed by Lyndal Roper in her study of Reformation Augsburg as "the holy household," took the power of prayer and preaching out of the hands of the corrupt Catholic clergy and placed it squarely between the palms of the Calvinist patriarch, who emulated his biblical prototypes, exhorting his household flock nightly.(7) There was no room for his wife's self-expression; her voice, like those of her children, day-laborers, or any visitors to the household, was mute before the biblical preachments of the father. Beroalde de Verville in Le Moyen deparvenir tells a tale that neatly describes the painful lengths to which Protestant patriarchs were popularly perceived to go in their use of the biblical Word to ensure the subordination - and, some would argue, the downright subjugation - of their spouses.(8) Hauled before the Consistory in Geneva for beating his wife, a Huguenot immigrant is instructed to retain some measure in his punishment of his wife. The next time he loses his temper, he adheres ironically to the Calvinist plain style of the literal application of words and does indeed use some measure: he beats his wife with a ruler. The Consistory again chides him, instructing him to punish her with the tongue only. Dutifully, in a fit of rage, the husband whips his wife with an enormous smoked oxen's tongue, hard as wood. Finally, the frustrated Consistory enjoins him to chastise her with the Word of God alone. In a subsequent argument with his wife, the Huguenot husband beats her mercilessly with a Geneva Bible - leather-bound, brass-studded, thick as the circumference of four men's arms, and heavier than sin. Admittedly, this tale is probably apocryphal, and the actual minutes of the Genevan Consistory do not systematically bear out a sustained attempt at the physical subjugation of women; rather, they attest to a concern for women's rights within the possibilities of the time period. However, it is a fact that women were silenced doctrinally: for example, the duchess of Ferrare was reprimanded by Calvin for stylistic elasticity and a failure to heed the mandates of plain style expression.(9) Thus, the Word, in the Protestant subculture, was a source of surveillance and control for all, but particularly for Calvinist women.

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.

WOMAN AS SILENT PRE-TEXT IN AGRIPPA D'AUBIGNE'S WORK

We begin by noting the scarcity of self-conscious and self-descriptive women writers of the Protestant Reformation in France. Charlotte de Mornay wrote her Memoires in tandem with those of her much more famous husband Philippe, but her self-expression generally seems subordinated to his more prominent public role and persona. Catherine de Parthenay's tragedy, Judith et Holopherne, was written and performed at La Rochelle in 1573, but this play was primarily obedient biblical exegesis. Marie Dentiere delivered capsule narratives of Reformed history, but on the whole these were devoid of autobiographical content.

Calvinist women of brilliant culture and influence thus incessantly relegated themselves to the secondary roles of support systems for their Calvinist men. Agrippa d'Aubigne describes Renee, duchess of Ferrara, friend and protector of Clement Marot, correspondent with John Calvin, hostess to d'Aubigne himself, and a woman of constant Reformist spirit, as a mere silent pre-text for his own textual peacockery: "The Duchess of Ferrara received them with her customary humanity, chief among them d'Aubigne who she caused for three days in a row to be seated . . . beside her so that she might hear his youthful discourses on how one should not fear death."(17) Here, d'Aubigne exemplifies how a Calvinist male writer treats women. His treatment is conventional; it is hardly surprising that women should be shown in this subordinate role. What makes the approach of this particular male writer interesting is that in spite, or perhaps because of his stance and actions, it paradoxically culminates in a valorization of women. A counter-direction thus subtends his discussion of women and undermines it. Why is this so? Is this indicative of some fundamental anxiety regarding women? Why does he arrive, as we shall see, at the point of almost feminizing his own discourse?

There is a related question. Does the scarcity - indeed, the virtual nonexistence - of literarily expressive Huguenot female writers have any reflection in the literature of their male contemporaries? Agrippa d'Aubignes body of texts glances briefly at women, notably in his autobiography, Sa vie a ses enfants, his "Lettre a roes filles," and in portions of Les tragiques, particularly those segments devoted to decrying Catherine de Medicis and to describing a few exemplary women martyrs. From these oblique references, I argue that women's role within male-dominated Calvinist literature can help us define the conditions hobbling female Calvinist self-expression. Examination of texts such as d'Aubigne's may prepare the way for a careful auscultation of the few texts by Calvinist women writers of the sixteenth century which do exist. An effort to recuperate these silenced voices must therefore begin by locating them within male writing, as textual traces or citational fragments, references to a persistently obscured "other" who, despite the male author's attempt to efface her, nonetheless persists in fulfilling a very potent textual function.

THE ABSENT MOTHER/MUSE

It is surely significant that d'Aubigne begins his autobiography by referring to his mother, who died giving birth to him. D'Aubigne's name, Agrippa, derives from aegere partus ("torn away from"); his identity is the brutal consequence of being ripped away from the mother. His existence is both the cause and the effect of her death. A striking counterpoint to the image of the torn mother from whom the infant's body is rent is also displayed in the first book of Les tragiques. Here, France is the mother, helpless, speechless, bleeding from the intestinal warfare of her sons. Thus inscribed at the head of d'Aubigne's endeavor is the figure of the woman who must be relentlessly silenced and textually tortured, so that male expression may occur.

In the dream sequence early in Les tragiques, d'Aubigne describes a female figure, reminiscent or perhaps representative of his mother.(18) This dream figure is conspicuously mute. Physical proximity and even physical contact with the figure is stressed: some portentous interaction, perhaps a transfer of power or knowledge, occurs as the figure enters the bedchamber and then proceeds into the ruelle, that tight space between the bed and the wall that, in literature of the period, symbolizes physical, if not sexual, familiarity. The ruelle also symbolically stands for the space of female authority, which accounts for the developments of a scant fifty years later, when institutionalized male authority in the person of Richelieu sought to gag the nascent female assertiveness of the salons and threatened to deprive women specifically of their ruelles and bedchambers.(19) Returning to Les tragiques, the mother figure then rips away the bedcurtains and embraces the boy in his bed. The result of this contact with the woman lasts fifteen days: young d'Aubigne, apparently contaminated by contact, loses utterly the ability to speak. His status is thereby temporarily equated with the silence of the mother, and of other female figures in his text.

The next paragraph moves ahead three years. Its concern is to restore the boy's speech. Such revoicing is only possible through paternal permission. D'Aubigne's father reconfers the ability of self-expression on his son in textual, rather than solely verbal, form: he promises to have d'Aubigne's translation of Plato printed. Thus literary production is produced through male agency and devolves from an exclusively male genealogy.

D'Aubigne's preface to Sa vie describes the discourse of d'Aubigne's life as taking place in "la privaute paternelle." This patriarchal space, replicating the private retreat within which Protestants were now empowered through increased literacy and greater access to vernacular Bibles to read and interpret the Bible on their own and for themselves, is also that space which for d'Aubigne licenses the life-writing of the self. He then replicates this space of "paternal privacy" in his communications to his children, urging them to safeguard his texts, his reputation and his life, in the patriarchal cloister of the home which he himself has founded. Physical contact with the father is thus clearly shown to be the prerequisite of writing, as d'Aubigne recounts the paternal scene of transmission of knowledge, secrets and autobiography: "This is what I intend, when I grant your reasonable request: here is the discourse of my life [found in/written in/situated in] paternal privacy . . . Therefore, having no need to blush in front of you, either for my accomplishments or for my faults, I relate my story, [in both of these aspects], to you as if I still held you on my knee."(20)

In conveying these secrets to his children, d'Aubigne ironically leaves himself without a textual heir, for he writes to his two daughters, Marie and Louise, and to his son Constant, whom he later repudiated for loose-living and apostasy. (Another son, "Dieudonne," was a bastard and so was omitted from the family tableau.) The result is that no dialogue with the author may ensue. Rather, the legitimate and acceptable children - mere women - become passive repositories for the text. Indeed, while the scene of transmission described above is ostensibly that of a doting father caressing his children in his lap, the effect of the passage is to create ligatures and confines: the destinataires of his text are held tightly by the father, thereby kept in place and physically fixed in the subordinate position of reception, without agency of their own. D'Aubigne further orders, "I have one more thing to command of you: that no more than two copies of my book be made, asking you to guard them safely, allowing neither to go out of the house."(21) The two copies are for his two daughters who, good domestic Huguenot women, are primarily consigned to the limited space of the ancestral home, thereby obviating for them most possibilities for developing a public persona. Up to this point, we have seen a traditional patriarchal domination of female discourse. Now, however, something new begins to happen. Female expression begins to preempt male text, despite the fact that further curtailments are accompanied by threats. For instance, should the two daughters fail in their charge, their punishment would be singularly suited to their femaleness: they would be punished at the point of their vanity, a failing identified by Ecclesiasticus as peculiarly, if not exclusively, female: "If you fail me in this, your disobedience will be punished by those who envy you, and who will make a mockery . . . [of you] . . . stewing you in your own vanity and presumption."(22) Their female space, that of the home, is also the space that circumscribes the text. D'Aubigne's male voice, erupting out of silence, now ends in the silence of the women.

TO MY UNLETTERED DAUGHTERS

The title of d'Aubigne's letter, "A mes filles touchant les femmes doctes de nostre siecle," immediately signals a contrast in the worth and ability of his daughters; "mes filles" is nearly juxtaposed with, but nevertheless remains separated from, "les femmes doctes" by the intervening term "touchant" (which paradoxically avoids precisely what it claims to join, or "touch"). A further separation of women from textual creation occurs in the first line of the letter, where d'Aubigne addresses his daughters but then instantly speaks of his son, making men the "matter" of his discourse, and portraying his son alone in an active role of readership: "My daughters, your brother has brought you a summary of my Logic in French, that M. de Brouillon calls 'girls' logic,' and which I give to you herein, on the condition that you only use it among yourselves."(23) Again, the space for female textual interaction is strictly curtailed. The phrase "que vous n'en userez qu'en vous mesmes" relegates female readership to a position of extreme interiority; while men's learning aims at public application, private consultation with the text is all that is allowed to women. What d'Aubigne therefore gives with one hand, he takes back with the other. Further, d'Aubigne takes pains to protect men from the female abuse of knowledge, since "the use of arguments by women against their husbands is simply too malicious."(24) While he is aware of his daughters' desire to learn along with their brothers, he would prefer to deflect ("destourner") than to intensify ("eschaufer") their interest.

D'Aubigne text offers a series of sketches of exemplary contemporary women who he qualifies as not only knowledgeable ("savantes"), but also, more importantly, as successful ("de leur succez"). It is this conjunction of attributes that renders them appropriate models.

The first model is Marguerite de Navarre, author, noted evangelical, and sister of Francois I. D'Aubigne identifies her in biological fashion by age, function, and affiliation: "fille, femme, et mere de Roy." Only after affixing this tripartite label of biological and historical determinism does he acknowledge her writing. Significantly, he only recognizes her explicitly confessional literature (La Marguerite des Marguerites); he makes no mention of the more secular (and more fictional and creative) Heptameron.

A group of women writers follows, including Louise Labe. Several Italian women are mentioned for work characterized by piety. Elsewhere Queen Elizabeth of England deserves mention because of her ability to perform politics like a man: "Such Princesses are obliged by their condition to the care, knowledge, capacities, functions and exercise of authority of men."(25) Authority remains, nonetheless, the rightful province of men alone, as the concluding possessive ("autoritez des hommes") attests. Nevertheless, the Rohan women, including Anne de Rohan, Catherine de Parthenay, and their Soubise cousins, excel through their writing, apparently intimidating male writers: "The writing of these two women has made us hide our pens several times."(26)

D'Aubigne next mentions a certain Mademoiselle de Belle-Ville, who had expressed the desire to work as his secretary or transcriber. He describes her in a physically subordinate position: "This latter wanted to serve me . . . to write under me books which have been lost."(27) Is it without significance that most of d'Aubigne's writing that relates to women seems to suffer the same fate, that of being lost to posterity? For example, the "Logique des filles" to which he refers as the pretext of this letter is not extant, as a note to the letter observes, and the text which Mademoiselle de Belle-Ville copied "has been lost." It would appear also that d'Aubigne limits appropriate subject-matter for women to women themselves. Mademoiselle de Belle-Ville had urged him to develop the image of the fatal comet, presage of disaster, in the book "Miseres" of Les tragiques: "She urged me to write further concerning a pair of verses in my book Les tragiques that state, 'this comet threatens'."(28) What d'Aubigne does not state explicitly is nevertheless evident from quick reference to the passage in question (vv. 713-27): the comet foretells the evil machinations of a woman, Catherine de Medicis, who "is instrumental in wounding France / ... and causing all her suffering ... / This is a death-dealing woman."(29) Women speak only of women.

Another noted female amanuesis, Marie de Gournay, Montaigne's literary adoptive daughter, is identified solely by virtue of her association with the renowned male writer. We should note in passing, however, that as a Catholic, and, in regards to her literary periodization, a more solidly Renaissance than Reformation figure, de Gournay actually had more latitude to develop her self-expression through revision of male precursors than did Calvinist women writers.(38)

Finally, d'Aubigne speaks of a Genevan woman, Loyse Sarrasin. Although he purports to admire this woman greatly, he nevertheless portrays her as hamstrung by her femininity. Although capable of much, she is permitted little. "Honored by many learned men . . . having acquired all forms of wisdom," d'Aubigne writes, "she would have been capable, if her sex had permitted her, to give public instruction."(31) Her space for action is instead limited to her "cabinet," which d'Aubigne describes as a sort of "prison." This female scene curtails rather than facilitates her role in any public transmission of knowledge. However, the spatial limitation that d'Aubigne describes has the unexpected consequence of subordinating his literary production to her exigencies, at least as that writing occurs within her space: "She used her abilities to compel me by remonstrances, in the prison she made of her small room, as though for a child of twelve or thirteen, to write Greek verse and to do the translations to which she set me."(32) D'Aubigne next cites a poem about Loyse, thereby further containing both his and her poetic production as if within a set of recessed boxes. Not surprisingly, the poem that he cites frames Loyse within a private space in which her activity is limited to illustrating male attainments or urging women to further accomplishments.

D'Aubigne concludes by naming his mother, whom he had significantly omitted at the beginning of his autobiography, and stipulating instead the name of his father as that which licensed textual production. Here, however, it is appropriate that d'Aubigne cite his speechless mother as a model for his silent (and, by this letter, emphatically silenced) daughters. She, too, is a pre-text for his endeavors, "she of whom her son writes although he never saw or heard her."(33) The only way he knows his mother's intellect is through marginalia penned in her copy of the life of Saint Basil, and that writing is, of course, suspect to a Reformer because of its Catholicity. Here again, woman's writing is marginalized. It leans upon the solid block of male text for its only support. Without the male, it would be nonexistent. At best, it is a specious, misinformed gloss.

D'Aubigne underscores the futility of female learning, thereby thwarting the purported aims of his mysteriously nonexistent "Logique des filles" by concluding that "the usefulness of women of any such knowledge . . . is practically inapplicable to young women of middling estate, such as you are, for some such unfortunate women have abused, rather than profited, from it."(34) He reminds his daughters that their determination is biological "for when the nightingale has children . . . she sings no more."(35) Women's biological role, to produce offspring, thus both necessitates and produces her silence. (Interestingly, however, the gender of the nightingale is masculine. This suggests the existence of a male anxiety concerning the circumstances of his own literary production. Is d'Aubigne thereby telling his daughters that their very existence has, in some way, hampered his own speech?) A mythological intertext further reinforces the silencing, when Ovid recounts how the tongue of Philomel, the nightingale, was ripped out in order to prevent her speech that would condemn the man who raped her. The mythological intertext also adds the implicit threat of violence to the ploy of reinforcing the domestic role of women. D'Aubigne thus returns women to the constricted space, the holy household of the Calvinist norm, in which the father acts as patriarch and preceptor of the family, and the woman remains subordinate: "I'll say yet again that excessive augmentation of the intellect so inflates the heart, from which thing I have seen two evils result: the dislike of housework and of thriftiness, condescension toward a less-learned husband, and great strife and disharmony."(36)

THE MONSTROUS FEMALE BODY

It is not that d'Aubigne never shows women as possessors of power, but rather that he views those instances in which women do find themselves in positions hierarchically superior to men as monstrous. These are situations in which women's traditional femininity is undercut by an exaggerated display in which women become a parody of "womanliness": to d'Aubigne, they become anti-women. Or are they, rather, super-women?

The most obvious example is that mentioned earlier, Catherine de Medicis as incarnation of evil in all its female fleshliness. For instance, Catherine, the "impure Florentine," frequents bordellos and is a patroness of abortions. Catherine also constitutes another silent pretext for d'Aubigne's writing: she does not speak but instead displays a frightening image against which he reacts. However, this grotesque image ironically "mothers" his writing: that is, her presence sponsors and spurs on his description - however aghast - of her. Her image is monstrous display (monstrere: to show). Catherine animates creatures, living and dead, changing them into horrible noise-makers. They create a hideous cacaphony, which makes sound, not sense: "with her low mutters she calls and gathers serpents to her. . . ./ She disinters horrid, decomposed corpses, / and makes them croak out, in their awful, hoarse speech."(37) Her writing is as suspect as her person; her writing is stamped with sin and death: "Pandora, that treacherous woman, brings misfortune upon us, / Painting on a black field the enigma of our tears, / Drawing on her tapestries, to make mean mockery of us, the ways in which she steals our possessions and our lives."(38)

Catherine plies her trade in a space of textual exchange and travesty: "In vain, Queen, you have filled up a shop with such wiles."(39) Both Montaigne and Calvin have described "boutique" as a place of borrowing from the other, a derivative space of unauthorized appropriation.(40) By locating Catherine in this suspect space, d'Aubigne shows that her speech as monstrous woman will ultimately be without effect, since it is not to be found in the sure space (loci) of Scripture, nor in the confined, domestic space in which d'Aubigne portrays his daughters. (Of course, were the contrary to be true, paradoxically the foundation of woman's speech in Scripture would entail a negation of that very speech, an ultimate silencing of woman, since Scripture calls for woman's subordination.) Catherine's speech, in the end and despite her power, will undo her: "This house is none other than the house of France / The house whose foundations she undermines. / And that's also why she'll bring down her own work upon her head."(41)

There is, of course, an antithetical contrast to the monstrous woman. It is striking that the figuration of Vertu possesses features in common with the earlier portrait of d'Aubigne's mother. "Virtue" is an allegorical counter-construct to Catherine because Virtue is also located at court and because both Virtue and Catherine influence d'Aubigne's speech. Like d'Aubigne's mother, Vertu enters the door of his bedchamber and approaches what amounts to an allegorization of d'Aubigne as he reclines in bed. She, too, makes physical contact with d'Aubigne:

That was the last straw! Then Virtue lost patience as she listened at the door

With her entrance, the sun shone and gilded with its rays the bedroom and the bed.

Virtue appeared in the guise of a well-dressed matron.

She took her seat at the head of the bed,

Seized the trembling hand of her speechless child,

And reassured him with a chaste kiss.(42)

Like d'Aubigne's mother's ghostly apparition, Vertu's appearance deprives the male of speech. Unlike d'Aubigne's mother, however, because Vertu is an allegorical figure, and not a flesh and blood female, she is empowered to speak. Also, because she is not a monstrous female, her words make sense:

And she spoke thus: "My son . . . Receive from my hand and choose among the colors and flowers I hold . . . Those you will adopt for your own use always. Be self-possessed, my son, and self-contained, So as to avoid all that is superfluous to your needs. Observe your own boundaries closely, Pull yourself into yourself, Seek to appear less, and, in so doing, you will be more.(43)

What Vertu really proffers here is a sort of speech. She seems to be holding a bouquet of possibilities in the "colors and flowers" of rhetoric. Here again, the woman is pre-text for the male's self-fashioning, both of his person and of his speech. She is the generative cornucopia of his textual capacities as he selects from an array of options that she makes available to him but cannot herself exercise. Like d'Aubigne's mother, Vertu's description of what sort of speech he should speak verges on non-speech. Interestingly, however, Vertu advises d'Aubigne to imitate what he has qualified as acceptable female speech. Such speech is typified by circumspection, sobriety, and moderation, rather than "superfluo" In addition, it is characterized by interiority ("retire toi dans toi"), or even a reclusiveness, a folding back into the self that is certainly biologically more apt for the female model than for the externalized male sex thrusting its way into, and asserting itself in, the world. Finally, Vertu's model for speech is exclusively biblical. Vertu makes her appearance at the conclusion of the second book of Les tragiques, just as Catherine is featured near the end of the first book. This structural similarity suggests that Vertu's model for both writing and femininity acts as an antidote to Catherine's monstrous distortion of both. Additionally, however, as noted, Vertu's exhortations are self-undoing, and deny power to her gender.

Another counterpart to the monstrous figure is the exemplary figure of the woman. Lady Jane Grey is a particularly salient example. Although d'Aubigne lauds her for her courage in the face of death and records her desire to communicate and make a confession of faith before the audience, it is important that Jane does not vocalize her statement, unlike the voiced, articulate male figures of martyrs included in Les tragiques. Rather, she signifies through signs:

The young Queen, Having on the scaffold only her gloves and her prayerbook with which to make testimony, Stripped off her gloves from her tiny, thin hands . . . Then gave her prayerbook to the tower guard, With these words written in it.(44)

She is mute; the guard must read her writing for her. Such pantomime relegates women's speech to a perpetual status of incompleteness; the signs require a recipient, an interpreter, so that they may signify. D'Aubigne is he who limits women's sketches of speech.

SILENCING SPEECH

Viewed in light of the attempt to contain and restrain the female which characterizes d'Aubigne's texts, the conclusion of Les tragiques is striking, for it oddly returns d'Aubigne full-circle to a silent state, recalling his encounter with his voiceless mother and his own silent response. At the end of the text, confronted with the Beatific Vision, d'Aubigne is similarly speechless: "My mouth has no words. Everything dies, / My soul takes flight, and taking its rightful place, / Faints in ecstasy in God's lap."(45)

This Beatific Vision is unusual; I do not find it in other Calvinist male writers, and it seems more a persistent Catholic motif than Calvinist topos.(46) What are we to make of this Catholic trait within a Calvinist text? For d'Aubigne, the Beatific Vision is primarily perceived esthetically, as a mystic, spiritual phenomenon. To the degree that this is the case, the Beatific Vision is an encapsulation of female speech, that female voice which d'Aubigne persistently attempts to silence but by which he is himself ultimately determined. For in this male-dominated Calvinist system, esthetics, descried and distrusted, is analogous to that which is feminine. Rhetoric and flowery speech are decried by the Calvinist plain style. Nonetheless, the image with which d'Aubigne's writing culminates seems to say that estheticism will remain and female self-expression will persist, just as the text of Les tragiques stands as a paradoxical marker of this final moment of the male poet's silencing. Further, if we realign the image of the silenced soul in God's lap with the constraints that d'Aubigne placed on his daughters by dandling them on his knees in his own lap, we find a confession that paternal power is an effective obstacle to speech both for men and for women. We also (in the feminine gender of ame) find d'Aubigne exercising strategies of judicious alignment: he reconfigures his speech's aspects as in some measure female-encoded; paradoxically, it is through this very femaleness that he guarantees the survival and the expression of his speech.

D'Aubigne takes this speechlessness to be the imprimatur of salvation; in its finality, no further speech is possible or, most importantly, necessary. It is as though the initial encounter with the dream-figure mother prefigured the final silencing of speech, now stabilized in God. At least in the textual effects just mentioned, woman and God would appear to act in like fashion. Is it not then possible that female silence demonstrates a superior rather than an inferior status for women, a form of mystic speech that haunts male Calvinist writers who seek, somehow, to find signs in the world of their own election, but who obsessively return only to the validation of silence, the denial of their incessant attempts at speech? Women's non-speech might, in this reading, be a spiritual and otherworldly speech: a meta-speech overlaying male discourse.

PART OF A TEAM: STRATEGIES FOR SELF-ASSERTION BY CHARLOTTE DE MORNAY

In Charlotte de Mornay's Memoires de Charlotte Arbaleste sur la vie de Duplessis-Mornay son mari (1549-1602) - roughly contemporary with the time in which d'Aubigne was writing to his daughters about how they should curtail their speech - the problematic aspects of the search for a space for female expression are greatly magnified. Charlotte de Mornay, wife of the illustrious Calvinist statesman Philippe, wrote her memoirs purportedly in tandem with her husband's. We find, however, that she is only able to speak of herself in code, from the barest of margins: her pretext for her speech about the self is her husband's speech. Such a strategy constitutes an interesting inversion of d'Aubigne's texts, in which women are the silent pre-texts for his speech. However, what Charlotte has to say about herself, in the limited space in which she says it, is highly personalized and strong. Even though she whispers from the margins, her voice is heard. And it is heard as distinctly female, worthy in its own right. Charlotte, in many ways ineluctably subordinate to the Calvinist patriarchy, nevertheless expects more of herself and of her voice. However, she is not a revolutionary, either. The strategy she adopts is to speak through the male, as though into a speaking tube. The male's presence provides the acceptable facade, but the voice in which she speaks is very much her own.

The Memoires begin with the marriage of Charlotte and Philippe and conclude with the death of Philippe, the couple's eldest son, in 1605. Charlotte died a year later. The Memoires are of incontestable historical interest, containing the description of the actions and reflections of one of France's premier statesmen during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century. In addition, the Memoires are of significance because Du Plessis Mornay was an intimate of Henri IV and a devout Huguenot. In his later years he became estranged from Henri IV because of the latter's weak stance toward the Huguenot cause. Mornay was troubled by Henri IV's political temporizing in order to gain the support of his Catholic subjects. As such, his is a personality embroiled in the religious and political realities of his time, moving within yet also struggling against these conditions as he reveals the very limited options available to a Calvinist in exercising his confessional adherence.

However, what should interest us here is less immediately self-evident in the text proper. A literary reading rather than an historical assessment is required in order to answer the question as to why Charlotte de Mornay, in constructing a diptych-text (or so the title indicates), never offered equal time to the description of her life. The odd tension between the label "her memoirs" and the content of these memoirs, which are in fact almost exclusively devoted to discussing the husband, not the wife, needs to be explored. Indeed, it is very rare to hear Charlotte speak of herself, even in her own memoirs. One commentator on the Memoires has observed that "so intent is Mlle du Plessis on relating all that she thinks important in her husband's life that she neglects much that might have been of interest in her own. Of her early life she tells something but after her return from the Netherlands in 1582 the record is very meagre. She does not think it worthy to be included in her husband's memoirs."(47) This commentator seems to have forgotten - though Charlotte may have actually intended that her reader forget - that Charlotte purports to write her own recollections. Why are Philippe's Memoires written for him by his wife? (It is striking that Du Plessis Mornay does not begin to write his own memoirs until 1610, four years after the death of his wife. He clearly relied greatly on her abilities as a transcriber and a compiler.) Does Charlotte adopt his voice in order to perform this function? Does she fear that a female voice (unless masked) will not be given credence? Why, then, does her name form part of the title? What are the qualities of her own voice? Where in the text can we hear it? What is the relationship between her textual production and the males toward whom it is directed, including Du Plessis Mornay ("this is the example set by your father')(48) and Philippe the son ("I want you to finish what I've begun to write during your life")? Regarding the latter question, an interesting transference occurs between husband and wife in which the memoirs purportedly intended to perpetuate his life become, in fact, the guarantor of her memory, especially when she instructs her son that you shall "keep this book in memory of me."(50) His life, however preeminent in the discussion, is shaped as a mirror to refract her own life or her conception of the familial group as one in which she is a main player: "Philip['s] death was the last trouble his mother had to bear for she did not long survive him. At least she must have felt that he had not been unworthy of her hero, his father, although he did not live 'to finish that which I have begun to write concerning our lives.'"(51)

Finally, just how does Charlotte conceive of herself, and of herself as a writer, even if only as a memorialist? One possibility is suggested by the deliberate retention of her maiden name, rather than its incorporation into the identity of "Madame de Mornay."(52) Randie Cotgrave gives the meaning of arbaleste as "a crossbow."(53) Charlotte may therefore be asserting a rather militant self-perception here; her writing is her weapon. Certainly she vehemently defends her husband, even against would-be assassins, berating them in her text, recounting her cautionary words to him, protecting him with her prose. But she may also be both protecting and asserting herself.

Charlotte's role as a woman writer is complex and problematic. It is a great paradox that one of the most striking features of the French movement toward Protestantism was the part that well-born women played in it. Nevertheless, we can barely retrieve the statements of these otherwise noted women; their voices are scarcely audible. In Charlotte's writing of Philippe's Memoires, however, I suggest that we can view her acting determinedly and creatively of her own accord in two ways. First, she acts by editing her husband's life. In this way, he becomes at least in some measure her creature and creation, a literary fabrication rather than an historical personage. Secondly, she acts to initiate textual transmission. In several scenes, she provides the impetus for textual development by suggesting a topic to her prolific husband or, again, to her son. If she herself is not the actual matiere of the text, she is at the very least the originating impulse for textual development, as one of her statements illustrates: "During this year of 1575 M. du Plessis, at my request, wrote a discourse on life and death, together with a translation of some of Seneca's letters. It has since been printed, first in Geneva, then in Paris and in various other places, and very well received by those of both religions."54 Charlotte seems to possess great literary astuteness: as though prescient, she knows what should be written about, and is not surprised at the resulting text's eventual successful publication. Thus, in spite of her adoption of an unremittingly subordinate posture as regards her illustrious husband throughout the book ("I submit everything to M. du Plessis"), we can see that behind the scenes Charlotte possessed considerable power.(55) This power seems always and in every way related to her literary position, to her proximity to the source of writing and record-keeping, and to her association with books and texts: "M. Duplessis told me to retreat to the Antwerp gate with my children because this would be the last place where the troops would rally if the city was taken, and that I must be sure to save his nearly finished book; I did as he bade me."(56) Some thirty years later, the sieur de Brantome called one of his aunts, an authoritative - albeit chatty - woman, "a true court records-book," in this way turning the woman into an authority, and, significantly, a text gendered as male ("un registre").(57) In the above quotation, Charlotte's importance would appear to derive from something markedly akin to the depository-like quality of d'Aubigne's daughters vis-a-vis his autobiography: she is to safeguard her husband's literary production. If, however, she had remained silenced, our memory of Philippe (at least in this intimate format) might not in fact exist. Moreover, Charlotte's femaleness is never elided; it is central to her function in the text. Childbearing, childrearing, and textual recording and safekeeping are woven together in an essentialist portrait defining a woman's significance for a man. These same qualities, however, are also responsible for describing the nature and extent of a woman's power over a man through her writing agency.

Although she seems at first an appendage to her husband, dependent on his pretext for text, she moves from a stance of self-effacement which appears initially to exalt her husband's importance and yet which, in the path it traces from the general to the particular, pares him down to manageable detail: "We need often to go back over the threads of our lives . . . like a child led by the hand, on which God dispenses a special dew of his grace and kindness. . . . We are especially ungrateful if . . . we don't leave memories/written accounts for our children ... namely, concerning the person of M. Duplessis their father."(58) Du Plessis's life thus becomes an illustration of a larger, divine plan, one which it is Charlotte's privilege and responsibility to convey.

If Charlotte's role is to safeguard the text perpetuating her husband's renown, she becomes absolutely essential to his self-construction rather than a bit-player in the drama of his life. How does she nevertheless use his self-construction to devise her own textual identity? Her endeavor plays off of the (initially) stronger male enterprise; like ivy, she wraps herself around the prose of the male life, making herself essential as its narrator, distinguishing herself when she chooses to speak of her own life as distinct from his. Thus, her legitimacy is ready-made: there is an obvious reason for her presence, that of recounting his life. However, as ivy penetrates the small spaces between bricks with its roots, thereby enlarging the cracks between them, she inserts herself into the interstices of the prose of his life, making a greater space for her own self-expression. She is not able to say much about herself; her own role-definition is thoroughly Calvinist: that of helper and mate.(59) However, by virtue of being the wife of a great man, some self-importance accrues to her, emboldening her on occasion to speak specifically of herself. These are the occasions to which we must listen.

Sometimes Charlotte parodies her subject's voice. We can hear the occasions in which she speaks as Mornay precisely because her own voice is, if not self-referential, clearly stylistically separate from his. The times when she adopts his voice are marked by a profusion of semicolons, a punctuation mark that he favors in his letters to her, and which she transcribes in the text.(60) In addition, like a man in a hurry, he is prone to terse statements and sentence fragments: "During this respite they asked him why he had taken up arms; answer: Religion. They ask[ed] him if he would not like to change religion; answered that he'd rather die; if he wasn't one of those politiques, answered no."(61) However beloved he may be, she nonetheless in this way truncates his speech throughout her text.

Charlotte is also prone to situate herself within her husband, as the witness to his thoughts and integrity: "and so I can testify that never would he have thought of or expected something different."(52) She imitates textually her self-perception of inclusion within him by frequently enclosing her own remarks within parentheses: "and from there he went to Paris to meet the King (where I had already gone on ahead to await him)."(63) If the parenthetical remark were really insignificant, it wouldn't have been included. Thus, Charlotte makes the parenthesis a paradoxical stylistic placemark of her own presence. Somewhat parasitically, within his space is where she develops her own space; she is the authoritative final recourse for the veracity of the text, and as such, she has value in and of herself.

Charlotte's writing endeavor always purports to be oriented both outside and beyond herself; her text is intended to glorify God, to participate in a larger textual network constituted by the Bible: "my most honored husband and lord, of whom I wish, God willing, to write, so that posterity will know of him and will fear God and hope in him."(64)

Identity at first seems to be constructed uniquely in reference to one's religious affiliation: "my servant, who was a believer [read: Calvinist]."(65) However, here too Charlotte performs a process similar to the pattern of diminishment she had employed on Du Plessis Mornay. For instance, in her account of the Saint Bartholemew's Day Massacre - an unusually detailed account containing information nowhere else available in the literature of the time period - Charlotte passes from the description of a mass phenomenon to an autobiographical statement. What we hear about, ultimately, are her own perceptions of the event, and some of the killings that occurred elsewhere in France for a week and a half after the massacre in Paris. She learns of the massacre itself while visiting her sister: "I made the decision, to take my mind off things and to better my health, to go spend the winter at my sister's house . . . while I was still bedridden... someone came to me [there] in great fright, telling me that everyone was being killed."(66) This is one of the few occasions in the text in which Charlotte's voice and experiences utterly dominate; she forgets to speak of her husband, and only reminds herself of him several detailed pages later: "now let me get back to Mr. Duplessis."(67)

Charlotte is upholding herself as a writer ("I wrote everything by my own hand")(68) and as an explicitly female writer ("I wrote a letter to tell him goodbye, and to ask his prayers for our children"),(69) when we note the equation of textual production and motherhood. Very often, she describes herself or her husband writing, then records the birth of another child. She gave birth to ten children, so the equation between motherhood and textual production is frequent. She sees herself as special in this light; referring to her meeting with Georgette de Montenay, the celebrated Protestant emblematist, Charlotte notes how unusual it is, indeed, to be a woman writer: "She is really a virtuous woman, and she has even written a few things."(70)

Finally, there are brief paragraphs - almost throw-away lines - in which Charlotte does refer explicitly to herself. These sections are important to examine for their relation to the events she is describing in her husband's life and for the language in which they are being expressed. Most significant, perhaps, is chapter 8, which is important in light of its subsequent excision by Charlotte from the Memoires. It is in this chapter that she recounts how she was criticized for her fashionable dress by the Reformed community at Montauban, and consequently also justifies her vestmentary choice. Does her decision to separate this chapter from the body of the Memoires reflect how she felt "held apart" and ostracized? Throughout this chapter, although writing autobiographically, Charlotte speaks of herself exclusively in the third-person singular. She thereby demonstrates an unusual textual flexibility regarding pronoun use that results in an extraordinary self-reflexivity enabling her to examine herself, as it were, from the standpoint of the "other." Her text thus becomes the speculum for thoughts and discoveries about herself, reflecting a distance from the cultural over-determination constructed around her: "Mile du Plessis made no change in her way of living [at Montauban] . . . behaving exactly [as formerly] . . . there are many deputies from most of the churches who can bear witness that Mile du Piessis neither in dress nor in behaviour showed vanity or cause for scandal."(71) In this statement, Charlotte demonstrates the profound feelings of alienation of self that afflicted her and, presumably, other Calvinist women writers. For the only way in which she is ultimately able to defend herself from calumny is by legitimizing herself through the male gaze: the patriarchy at Montauban, she claims, will stand up for her; they found nothing to reprove in her attire. Here again, as a woman, she must slide herself behind a male protector or legitimizer. Yet the troubling and strong figure of the woman - Charlotte in luxurious, ostentatious attire - nevertheless remains imprinted on our consciousness. She has used this strategy of shimmering self-effacement coupled with persistence to express herself, just as she has used her husband as a sanctioning factor for her writing.

Why does Charlotte distance herself textually from herself? Could she make this stylistic decision in order to dramatize the schism from selfhood that she experienced due to the self-denial and adamant self-regulation necessitated by Reformed perspectives on morality and attitudes toward women? It is surely no accident that in this chapter in which she speaks of herself as though she were not herself, she also transcribes the "Church confession of faith" in its entirety, as though it were the factor responsible for such self-elision.

We can glimpse Charlotte's significance in other ways. For instance, portions of her correspondence with Philippe are in code, which in the sixteenth century was very often fashioned from such books as the Bible. Philippe composed the letters, addressed to her, with the understanding that the code was in her possession. The woman thus becomes the privileged medium for the deciphering of the coded text, as well as an exalted reader of Scripture.

Thus, one way in which Charlotte speaks - indirectly - about herself is through coded exchanges with her husband. The letters in the Memoires begin in 1588 and conclude in 1606 with Charlotte's death. Of the sixty-one letters written by Mornay to his wife and included in the body of the correspondence, twenty contain coded portions. In a striking one-third of the purportedly private communication between husband and wife, Mornay feels the need to express himself in what to an outsider are deliberately obscure terms to an outsider. What does such intimate confidence in Charlotte, the privileged "insider" in Mornay's eyes, tell about Charlotte's relationship to her husband or her sense of herself as a writer and her development of a personal voice? In most cases, the coded portions either give instructions to Madame Mornay, or provide details about the movements of Huguenots within the French realm. Moreover, the body of coded text often spatially challenges the body of uncoded prose, thus creating a bizarre visual effect in which numbers proliferate and defy deciphering. A very deft, sophisticated process of deciphering is thus required, and Charlotte is the one chosen to perform that process.

What were the dynamics operative for Charlotte in this role as decoder? A female Calvinist's position - however privileged her position may be - is doubly marginalized: first, by her religious adherence, and secondly by her gender.

Alternately moving between the roles of herself and her husband, Charlotte passes her text on to posterity with the requirement that a male voice to enter into the constraints she experienced as a female, in order that the journal may be completed; indeed, she requires of her son that he write as if he were she. She creates space for her expression by constructing an intertexual network composed of the text of her husband's life and the Bible.

CONCLUSION

Two main lines of argument emerge from our examination of the Huguenot male author's disregard of women's capacities for worthwhile writing, and from our look at how one Huguenot woman writer wrote around such a dismissive attitude. First, in anticipation of a much later age, that of the early nineteenth century, when the Protestant male's increasing involvement in trade outside of the home caused biblical instruction of the children to shift from the patriarch to the mother and housewife - thus engendering a saccharine rhetoric of perfection and piety applied to women who now fulfilled this sacred function - we can discern an adamant self-situation of the woman within the household realm already assigned to her by the Calvinist patriarchy. Through a determined near-identification of herself with the household (which itself has biblical antecedents: for instance, the book of Judges recounts the tale of a woman called Beth, which in Hebrew means household), the Huguenot woman appropriates Scripture to herself in a very pragmatic, utilitarian sense. Like a broom, a mop or a spinning wheel, Scripture has for her practical uses that warrant her contact with it and that, to her, seem to encourage her working with it. The Huguenot woman uses what she is given: the Reformation took away a traditional site for female expression - that of the nunnery - and assigned women's role squarely to the household. The Huguenot woman finds ways to use this space to facilitate her speech. In a housewifely way, she avoids being self-aggrandizing, while using the Bible in a functional sense that conforms to the biblical model of husbandry - and especially in the parable of the talents probably the most favored parable of Huguenot writers.(72)

The paradoxical consequence of this apparently submissive, culturally-encoded posture is the emergence, in women's writings, of an extreme individuation on the margins. Indeed, those few strong female texts which were written by Calvinist women authors may in fact constitute a subversion within a subversion, as women overturn strictures upon their expression. These are double bonds: strictures imposed by men, yet also those very limits against which these same men have had to push in order to write within the system of Calvinism. A strategy of hyper-domestication ensures her acceptance socially, while enabling her to make statements about herself within a legitimized framework. Secondly, the ways in which she engages herself and, potentially, other women in her texts (since she writes to offer herself as a new exemplum) creates what I would call a fledgling community of discussants. We might say that this woman's textual community parallels, and in many respects (which I cannot explore here, but which prove to have both literary and theological ramifications), draws on, the Protestant doctrine of the priesthood of all believers.

The unexpected (and heretofore unexplored) consequence of this community of discussants is the emergence of a probable link to the salons of the seventeenth century. The salons, the first real arena in which the voices of French women could be heard, became increasingly acceptable because of Cartesian innovations in thinking which valued ratiocinated beings, whatever their gender, and even more significantly had a surprisingly high percentage of Protestant women in their ranks.(73) Indeed, Descartes himself was much influenced by Protestant thought.(74) It is worth noting, however, that the salons, while achieving considerable recognition and room for women's maneuvering, were nonetheless socially and politically somewhat marginalized, analogous to the situation of Huguenots in France. The salons further paralleled other male-dominated and more culturally potent institutions such as the Academie francaise. They offered an alternative expression that was never codified or institutionalized, but rather contained within the intimate space of the living-room, perhaps mirroring in this the woman at the hearth in the Calvinist household. Regarding the position of the salons on the sidelines of society, Dorinda Outram notes that it was advantageous for women to adopt a discourse that positioned them on the side of power.(75) While Londa Schiebinger identifies the precursor of the predominantly single-sex salon in the seventeenth century as being the Renaissance court, it must be noted that the Renaissance court was a mixed-sex milieu.(76) The Protestant patriarchy, on the other hand, rigorously separated the sexes in many sectors of life, thereby offering a more viable paradigm for the single-sex salon that emerges a century later.

Huguenot women writers, few though they may have been, nevertheless had an influence. They described a new relationship with the Word. Through their individual manipulation of the Word, Huguenot women writers, in their modest and practical application of Scripture, stepped away - without appearing to - from the Calvinist ideal of the plain style, preparing the sort of play with language that typifies the plasticity of the salonnard's self-expression in the seventeenth century. Laboring within constraints to give birth to her self, the Huguenot woman writer engendered a genealogy of discussion and dialogue, interaction rather than intimidation, that found a paradoxical tributary in the relaxed, libertine climate of the salons.

FORDHAM UNIVERSITY 

1 Faye, 15.

2 I want to qualify the sort of work that I am doing in this article as both theoretical and somewhat speculative. In this article, I make some suggestions based on gender relationships among elite entities and encoded in elite literary texts. This is because, at this stage, more popular versions of the sorts of phenomena I am examining here - those sophisticated strategies like coding found in Charlotte's work - have not yet presented themselves. To some extent, such texts have their own conventions and forms and, admittedly and inevitably, will cause some warping and distortion. Further examination of the issues raised here would benefit from contextualization in non-literary sources and those of a less elite nature. Whether or not such an approach is indeed possible, I cannot at this stage aver.

3 Calvin, 1564, ii.

4 Beze, 57.

5 Ibid., 3.

6 See Coats.

7 Roper, 32.

8 Verville.

9 Gil, 35. On the other hand, we should note that Robert Kingdon has been editing the Registres of the Consistory, which provide wonderful glimpses into how, in many instances, women's equality was adamantly upheld by the city fathers.

10 Sankovitch, 250.

11 Thompson, 24: "Calvin is generally found in the conservative mainstream - that is, espousing the traditional and hierarchical theology of women - in his understanding of woman's subordination as the usual position which scripture seems to assign her . . . but neither does his exegesis depart from the text to indulge in the anti-woman rhetoric which occurs in . . . the commentators surveyed."

12 See Thomas Head's article, "Marie Dentiere: A Propagandist for the Reform" in Wilson, 260-282. On Calvin's treatment of Marie, see Douglass, 81 and 106. It does appear that Dentiere was granted more latitude for her preaching, and even eventually experienced some rapprochement with Calvin. Lisa Neale of the University of Puget Sound informed me of this.

13 Knox. For Roper, see Elizabeth McCutcheon's "Margaret More Roper: The Learned Women in Tudor England" in Wilson, 449-481.

14 Feminist scholars, eager to recuperate the lost voices of women during this period, have enriched our understanding by works of collation. Natalie Zemon Davis has rehabilitated women writers of the period as cultural exemplars in a great historical narrative. On the whole, with the exception of her 1987 work, theirs are not voices speaking out of individualized, self-aware texts. Merry Weisher-Hanks, similarly, has pointed to the significance of the Reformation for women writers. She does not, however, perform textual analyses of their expression, nor does she work with the very obvious constraints upon it.

15 Scholars are beginning to look at the Mornays. Mary McKinley of the University of Virginia recently delivered a paper on Charlotte at the Royaume de femynie conference, sponsored by the American University in Paris and held in Blois, France, 12-15 October 1995.

16 The quintessential emphasis on the quotidian for Calvinists, and particularly on the interior space of domestic life for female Calvinists, is discussed in Taylor, chap. 6. "Daily Life."

17 [D'Aubigne.sub.1], 387: 'La Duchesse de Ferrare les receut avec son humanite accoutumee, mais sur tous Aubigne qu'elle fit trois jours durant asseoir sur un carreau aupres d'elle pour ouir ses jeunes discours sur le mespris de la mort."

18 Professor Kathleen Perry Long of Cornell University has recently argued for the identification of the dream figure with the mother, basing her case on psychoanalyric theory. The article is forthcoming in Neophilologus.

19 Harth, 17, 19, and 25. She quotes from Somaize, "La Proces des Pretieuses," in Le Dictionnaire des precieuses, 2:69.

20 D'Aubigne, 384: "C'est ce que je fays en ottroyant vostre requeste raisonnable: et voicy le discours de ma vie, en la privaute patemelle . . . donc ne pouvant rougir envers vous ny de ma gloire, ni de roes fautes, je vous conte l'un et l'autre comme si je vous entretenois encores sur mes genoux."

21 Ibid.: 'J'ay encores a ordonner qu'il n'y air que deux copies de ce livre: vous accordants d'estre de leurs gardiens et que vous n'en laissies aller aucune hors de la maison."

22 Ibid.: "Si vous y failliez, vostre desobeissance sera chastiee pat vos envieux, qui esleveront en risee . . . et vous feront cuire vostre curieuse vanite."

23 [D'Aubigne.sup.2], 851: "Mes filles, vostre frere vous a porte mon abrege de Logique en Francois que M. de Brouillon a nomme la Logique des filles, et laquelle je vous donne a ceste charge que vous n'en userez qu'en vous mesmes" (emphasis added).

24 Ibid.: "car l'usage des elenches [arguments] des femmes envers leur maris est trop dangereus."

25 Ibid., 854: "Princesses qui sont par leur condition obligees au soin, a la cognoissance, a la suffisance, aux gestions et auctoritez des hommes."

26 Ibid., 852: "Les escrits des deus nous ont air cacher nos plumes plusieurs fois."

27 Ibid.: "Cette demiere me voulut servir . . . a escrire sous moy des livres qui ont este perdus" (emphasis added).

28 Ibid.: "Elle me contraignit d'escrire sur l'explication d'un distique qui est aux Tragiques: 'Ce comette menace'."

29 d'Aubigne(3) 1.724-26: "instruments / Des playes de France, et de tous ses tourments: / Une fatale femme."

30 Professor Cathleen Bauschatz of the University of Maine is working on this issue of carving out a place for female speech in Marie de Gournay's reworking on Montaigne.

31 [D'Aubigne.sup.2], 853: "Honoree de plusieurs doctes . . . ayant passe par tous les degrez de sciences, s'est veue capable, si le sexe luy eust permis, de faire des lecons publiques."

32 Ibid.: "[Elle] se servit de ceste puissance pour me forcer par reproches, par la prison qu'elle me donnoit dans son cabinet comme a un enfant de douze a treize ans, a faire les themes et les vers grecs qu'elle me donnoit."

33 Ibid., 854: "laquelle son fils qui en escrit n'a jamais veue."

34 Ibid., 853: "l'utilite que peuvent recevoir les femmes par l'excellence d'un tel savoir . . . est presque toujours inutile aux Damoiselles de moyen condition, comme vous, car les moins heureuses ont plus tost abuse qu 'use."

35 Ibid., 854: "car quand le rossignol a des petits . . . il ne chante plus."

36 Ibid.: "Je dirai encor qu'une eslevation d'esprit desmesuree hausse le coeur aussy, dequoy j'ay veu arriver deux maux, le mespri du mesnage et de la pauvrete, celuy d'un mary qui n'en sait pas rant, et de la dissension."

37 D'Aubigne(3), 1.905-939: "de son murnure; die attire et convie les serpens/ . . . Desterre sans effroi les effroyables corps . . . / Les fait . . . ouir leur voix enrouee / . . . en vain."

38 Ibid., 1.987-999: "La traistresse Pandore apporta nos mal-heurs, / Peignant sur son champ noir l'enigme de nos pleurs, / Marquant pour se moquer sur ses tapisseries / Les moyens de ravir et nos biens et nos vies."

39 Ibid., 1.921: "En vaine, Roine, tu as rempli une boutique."

40 Montaigne, 1923, 3.12.1039, uses "magasin" and "boutique" interchangeably in this light; Calvin, 1552, 1.1.v, speaks of the deceptive capacities of the "boutique de l'ame."

41 D'Aubigne(3), 1.865-67: "Cette maison n'est que la maison de France, La maison qu'elle sappe; et c'est aussi pourquoi / Elle fait tresbucher son ouvrage sur soi."

42 D'Aubigne(3), 2.1319-34: "Ce fut assez, c'est la que rompit patience / La vertu, qui de l'huis, escoutoit . . . / Voici un beau soleil, qui de rayons dorez / De la chambre et du lict vid les coins honorez. / La vertu paroissant en matrone vestue . . . / Prit au chevet du lict pour sa place une chaire, / Saisit la main trenablante a son enfant transi, / Par un chaste baiser l'asseure."

43 Ibid., 2.1335-74: "Et dit ainsi: /'Mon fils . . . recois pour faire choix des fleurs et des couleurs / Ce qu'a traits racourcis je dirai pour res moeurs. / Sois continent, mon fils, et circoncis pour l'estre / Tout superflu de toi . . . / Serre l[e] a l'estroit . . . / Retire toi dans toi, parois moins, et sois plus."

44 D'Aubigne(3), 4.226- 33 "[La] jeune Reine, / Qui dessus l'eschaffaut se voyant seulement / Ses gants et son livret pour faire testament, / Elle arrache ses mains et maigres et menues/ . . . Puis donna son livret au garde de la tour / Avec ces mots escrits."

45 D'Aubigne(3), 7.1216-18: "Ma bouche est sans parole: / Tout meurt, l'ame s'enfuit, et reprenant son lieu / Ecstatique se pasme au giron de son Dieu."

46 I contrast the conclusion of d'Aubigne's epic poem with that of Du Bartas, La Sepmaine, e.g. This latter ends on an assertive, self-confident note, having catalogued the entirety of creation. But he is not confronted or undone by a face-to-face contemplation of God.

47 De Witt edition of Mornay, 1869, 79.

48 Mornay, 1923, iii ("A mon fils"): "Voicy l'exemple que vostre pere vous donna."

49 Ibid.: "Je desire que vous acheviez ce que j'ay commence a escrire du cours de nostre vie."

50 Ibid.: "Vous garderez cest escrit en memoyre de moy."

51 De Witt in Mornay, 1869, 14.

52 Of course, this practice was common in sixteenth century France, where inheritances often proceeded matrilineally; however, elsewhere the extent of Charlotte's apparent identification with her husband might lead one to expect her to at least refer to herself by his name, as well.

53 Cotgrave, 342.

54 Mornay, 1923, 123 (emphasis added).

55 Ibid., 190.

56 Ibid., 169.

57 Brantome, 303: "un vray registre de cour."

58 Mornay, 1923, 6-9: "[Il faut] mediter souvent le fil de nostre vie . . . mais comme d'un enfant qu'il mene par la main . . . sur lequel . . . il fait degoutter une particuliere et speciale rousee de sa grace et benignite . . . . Particulierement nous sommes ingratz, sy . . . nous n'en laissons la memo a noz enfans . . . nommement . . . la personne de M. Duplessis leur pere."

59 Davis, 1975, 91. "Calvinist wives - even the most unruly of them - never went so far as to deny the theory of the subjection of women within marriage."

60 I have checked this punctuation in the transcriptions. It is idiopathic and not due to subsequent editorial changes.

61 Mornay, 1923, 96: "Pendant ceste halte on l'interrogea qui l'avoit meu de prendre les armes; respond: la Religion. On luy demande s'il ne vouloit pas changer; respond qu'il quitteroit plustost sa vie; s'il n'estoit point de ces politiques; respond que [non]."

62 Ibid., 105: "et puis tesmoigner que jamais monsieur du Plessis n'en peut concevoir ny attendre autre chose."

63 Ibid., 109: "Et de la, alia trouver le Roy a Paris, (ou j'estois allee l'attendre)."

64 Ibid., 13: "Mon tres honore seigneur et mary, celuy duquel je veux, aydant Dieu, escrire, pour servir apres nous a nostre posterite, a craindre Dieu et a esperer en luy."

65 Ibid., 59: "une mienne servante, qui estoit de la religion" (emphasis added).

66 Ibid., 60.

67 Ibid., 71: "Je reviens maintenant a M. Duplessis."

68 Ibid., 145: "J'escris le tout de ma main."

69 Ibid.: "J'escrivis une lettre pour luy dire adieu, et luy recommander noz enfans."

70 Ibid., 166: "C'est une dame de grande vertu et qui mesme a escrit quelques choses."

71 Ibid., chap. 8, esp. 181.

72 Cf. Lestringant's examination of the Calvinist potter and writer, Bernard Palissy, and his use of the parable of the talents.

73 Many Protestants were, in fact, involved in the salon movement, men as well as women. Harth, 32, notes that "in the admittedly close-knit, provincial, mainly Protestant society of Castres, at least several marriages resulted from collegial connections in Paul Pellisson's academy." See also Niderst, 11-109.

74 As was John Locke, for example, and many other Enlightenment figures. Davis, 1975, chap. 8,227-71, lists more than five such Protestant Enlightenment rationalists, among them de Serres, de Brieux, and Le Clerc.

75 Outram, 122 and 131.

76 Schienbinger, 22.

Bibliography

Aubigne(1), Agrippa d'. Sa vie a ses enfants. In Oeuvres, ed. Henri Weber, 385-463. Parts, 1969.

Aubigne(2), Agrippa d'. "[Lettre] A roes filles touchant les femmes doctes de nostre siecle. In Oeuvres, ed. Henri Weber, 851-854. Paris, 1969.

Aubigne(3), Agrippa d'. Les tragiques. In Oeuvres, ed. Henri Weber, 3244. Paris, 1969.

Beze, Theodore de. Abraham sacrifiant. Ed. Keith Cameron. Geneva, 1967.

Blaisdell, Charmarie. "Renee de France between Reform and Counter-Reform." Archiv fur Reformationsgeschichte 63 (1972): 196-226.

-----. "The Matrix of Reform: Women in the Lutheran and Calvinist Movements." In Triumph Over Silence: Women in Protestant History, ed. Richard Greaves: 1344. Westport, CT, 1985.

Brantome, Pierre de Bourdeille. Les dames galantes. Ed. Paul Morand. Parts, 1967.

Bratt, John. "The Role and Status of Women in the Writings of John Calvin." In Renaissance, Reformation, Resurgence, ed. Peter De Klerk, 1-17. Grand Rapids, 1976.

Calvin, Jean. Institution de la religion chrestienne (Geneva, 1552). Ed. J. Benoist. Paris, 1963.

-----. "Exposition des Pseaumes." In Pseaumes. Geneva, 1564.

Coats, Catharine Randall. Subverting the System: d' Aubigne and Calvinism. Kirksville, MO, 1990.

Cotgrave, Randle. A Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues. London, 1611.

Davis, Natalie Zemon. Society and Culture in Early Modern France. Stanford, 1975.

-----. Fiction in the Archives: Pardon Tales and Their Tellers in 16th Century France. Stanford, 1987.

-----. Women on the Margins: Three Seventeenth Century Lives. Cambridge, MA, 1995.

Dentiere, Marie. La guerre et deslivrance de la ville de Genesve (1536) and Defense pour les femmes (L'Epistre tres utile). In Memoires et documents publies par la Societe d'histoire et d'archeologie de Geneve, ed. Albert Rilliet, 309-84. Geneva, 1881.

-----. Epistre tres utile faicte & composee par une femme Chrestienne de Tornay, Envoyee a la Royne de Navarre seur de Roy de France (1539). In Correspondance des Reformateurs, ed. A.-L. Herminjard, 5:295-304. Geneva, 1874. Rpt. Nieuskoop, 1966.

Douglass, Jane Dempsey. Women, Freedom and Calvin. Philadelphia, 1985.

Du Bartas, Guillaume. La Sepmaine: texte de 1581. Ed. Yvonne Bellenger. Parts, 1981.

Faye, Jean-Pierre. Theorie du recit. Paris, 1972.

Gil, Christiane. Renee de France. Paris, 1990.

Harth, Erica. Cartesian Women: Versions and Subversions of Rational Discourse in the Old Regime. Ithaca, 1992.

Jullien, Vincent. "Le corps, matiere premiere de la philosophie naturelle au XVIIe siecle." In Le corps au XVIIe siecle. Acres du premier colloque conjointement organise par la North American Society for Seventeenth-Century French Literature et le Centre international de Rencontres sur le XVIIe siecle, ed. Ronald Tobin, 53-66. Paris, 1995.

Knox, John. First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women In Works of John Knox, ed. David Laing, vol. 1. Edinburgh, 1895.

Labe, Louise. "Elegies." In Oeuvres, ed. Enzo Giudici, 80-92. Geneva, 1981.

Lestringant, Frank. "Le prince et le potier: introduction a la Recepte veritable de Bernard Palissy (1563)." Nouvelle revue du seizieme siecle 3 (1985): 5-24.

Lewalski, Barbara. Writing Women in Jacobean England. Cambridge, MA, 1993.

Montaigne, Michel de. Essais. Ed. Pierre Villey. Paris, 1923.

Mornay, Charlotte de. Memoires de Charlotte d'Arbaleste, Madame de Mornay. Ed. Madame de Witt. Paris, 1869.

-----. Memoires de Charlotte Arbaleste sur la vie de Duplessis-Mornay son mari. Ed. Lucy Crump. London, 1923.

-----. The Memoirs of Madame de Mornay. Ed. Lucy Crump. London, 1928.

Navarre, Marguerite de. L'Heptameron. Ed. Simone Reyff. Paris, 1982.

Niderst, Alain. Madeleine de Scudery, Paul Pellisson et leur monde. Paris, 1976.

Outram, Dorinda. "Le langage male de la vertu: Women and the Discourse of the French Revolution." In The Social History of Language, ed. Peter Burke and Roy Porter, 45-62. Cambridge, 1987.

Parthenay, Catherine de. Judith et Holopherne. La Rochelle, 1573.

Roper, Lyndal. The Holy Household: Women and Morals in Reformation Augsburg. Oxford, 1989.

Sankovitch, Tilda. "Inventing Authority of Origin: the Difficult Enterprise." In Women in the Middle Ages and Renaissance: Literary and Historical Perspectives, ed. M. B. Rose, 227-324. Syracuse, 1985.

Schienbinger, Londa. The Mind Has No Sex? Women in the Origins of Modern Science. Cambridge, MA, 1989.

Taylor, Charles. Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity. Cambridge, MA, 1989.

Thompson, John Lee. John Calvin and the Daughters of Sara: Women in Regular and Exceptional Roles in the Exegesis of Calvin, HiS Predecessors, and His Contemporaries. Geneva, 1992.

Verville, Beroalde de. Le Moyen de parvenir. Ed. Ilana Zinguer. Nice, 1988.

Welch, Marcelle. "Le corps feminin. . . ." In Le corps au XVIIe siecle. Actes du premier colloque conjointement organise par la North American Society for Seventeenth-Century French Literature et le Centre international de Rencontres sur le XVIIe siecle, ed. Ronald Tobin, 67-77. Paris, 1995.

Wilson, Katharina M. Women Writers of the Renaissance and Reformation. Athens, GA, 1987.