Signe(s) d'Amante: L'agencement des Evvres de Louize Labe Lionnoize. (Reviews).

Daniel Martin, Signe(s) d'Amante: L'agencement des Evvres de Louize Labe Lionnoize.

(Etudes et Essaics surla Renaissance, 25.) Paris: Honore Champion, 1999. 530 pp. FE 490. ISBN: 2-7453-0264-7.

Floyd Gray, Gender, Rhetoric, and Print Culture in French Renaissance Writing.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. 227pp. $59.95. ISBN: 0-521-77327-X.

Two well-known critics address the crucial questions of rhetoric and gender in French Renaissance texts in their recent works. 'While one emphasizes formal, structural, and mythological aspects of a woman writer's work within a feminist context, the other calls for a revision of some feminist and other contextual readings of French Renaissance literature in conjunction with a more careful assessment of rhetorical norms and print culture of the period.

Daniel Martin, in Signe(s) d'Amante, argues that despite its appearance as a rather haphazard amalgamation of sonnets, elegies, mythological dialogue, and literary tributes, Louise Labe's volume of collected works constitutes a harmonious form, replete with a network of echoes, interferences, cross-references, and parallelisms on every level of its composition. Martin proposes that the artful construction of Louise Labe's CEuvres sheds light on her feminist intentions, namely celebrating the pleasure of writing and encouraging other women to engage in literary activities.

Martin's examination of lexical or semantic "echoes" illustrates such underlying topoi as the tension between glory and modesty, exhortation and reservation, and public declaration and personal perspective. Viewing Le Debat de Folie et d'Amour through a mythological lens, he identifies the third, numerically central "Discours" as pivotal and shows the shift in the concept of Amour from an absolute power to the individual's power to make himself loved (and thus the tension between Venus and Jupiter). Since the dialogue ends with Jupiter's commanding Folie and Amour to live together in harmony, and since the arguments against Folie include cliches of misogynist discourse, Martin concludes that Jupiter's decision ultimately embraces the "folly" of women's literary pursuits and the "folly" incorporated in Louise Labe's writings.

Throughout his analyses, Martin establishes numerous links between semantic or lexical patterns in different works in the collection, including the intertextual connections between Louise Labe and Ovid, Sappho, Petrarch, Marot, and Pontus de Tyard. As in his Architecture des Essais de Montaigne, Martin finds an overarching, symmetrical design in the sonnets, enriched by the process of "enchassement" or embedding in a number of groupings within the text.

In a concluding chapter entitled "Venus et Sappho," Martin insists on the convergence of amorous and literary tropes in Louise Labe's work, particularly through the themes of the basium and the sun. Finally, he suggests that the artfully organized works represent Louise Labe's triumph, both as a poet and as a woman from Lyons, while at the same time inscribing her amorous suffering -- it is through this constitutive tension that the poet expresses "signe[s] d'amant."

Some readers may question whether Martin, much like fifteenth- and sixteenth-century commentators of Petrarch's Canzoniere, seeks to impose a much greater coherence upon Labs's work than actually exists in the text. Also, one might note that the problem of agencement, or arrangement, sometimes serves only as an umbrella term for analyzing the interconnectedness among various lexical and thematic patterns in the text. But this 500-word review can scarcely do justice to Daniel Martin's 500 pages of analyses and close readings, many of which are both original and illuminating.

Floyd Gray, whose monumental anthology of sixteenth-century French poetry has enlightened many a neophyte, examines, in Gender, Rhetoric, and Print Culture in French Renaissance Writing, the extent to which various discourses focusing on gender reflect a literary rather than a social reality. From the outset, Gray distinguishes his method from the anachronistic practices of those who ignore the cultural reality or the rhetorical conditions in which sixteenth-century texts were written. Gray charges that in contextual or cultural criticism there is a tendency to read literally, without regard for the rhetorical constructions devised for a Renaissance reading public. Thus the principle of context must itself be contextualized in the work.

While the subject of women and literature in society has been studied extensively in recent years, Gray argues, it has usually been considered in conjunction with contemporary feminism and thus in an ideologically charged context. Further, unfamiliarity with "the right reading of early modern literary works" (6) has led certain critics to conflate the rhetorical dynamics of persuasion with the social prejudices of gender. Gray observes that Renaissance writings praising or defaming women are not necessarily feminist or antifeminist, and that the Querelle des femmes should be reviewed in light of humanist pedagogical methodologies of argumentation. In a section on the question of Panurge's decision whether or not to marry in the Tiers Livre, Gray insists on Rabelais's ludic rather than political designs, in contrast to the works of Jeanne Flore and Marguerite de Navarre, who use the same material for different ends. In the case of Jeanne Flore (whose gender remains unclear since the writer's identity has never been definitively established), the ironic and playful tone leaves ambiguous the question of whether women are to be seen as examples of sexual freedom or as manifestations of men's prejudices and expectations. Marguerite, for her part, contests both the precepts and techniques of misogynist history by the authority relegated to the devisants and ultimately to the reader. Both Jeanne de Flore and Marguerite thus invite readers to participate in literary activity and to assume moral responsibility in their reading.

Gray, like Daniel Martin, examines Louise Labe's Debat, but whereas Martin finds the mythological underpinnings to be central to the dialogues' design, Gray argues that mythology is ridiculed in the text or depicted as all too human. Gray further warns against reading the Debat as a feminist document ("a sometimes facile exercise"), seeing it instead as an argument for understanding between men and women in love (92). Yet like feminist critics, Gray portrays Louise Labe and Pernette du Guillet as women who create a distinct place for themselves in the margins of literature. Gray skillfully notes the occasional ludic twists, the poet's ironic distance from Perrarchan metaphors in Labe's work, and the strategies employed by printers of Lyons to market women's works to an increasingly heterogeneous audience.

Chapters on "The Women in Montaigne's Life" and "Sexual Marginality" complete the volume. The latter treats briefly writings on homosexuals, cross-dressing in the theatre, the androgyne myth, and medical treatises on women. Gray shows the profound ambivalence of Renaissance attitudes toward homosexuality, as illustrated in numerous contemporaneous texts, and he concludes the chapter by noting the increasingly blurred line between eroticism and pornography as the sixteenth century draws to a close.

Although his work builds upon a number of recent studies on women writers and gender that could be more fully recognized and credited in his text, Gray's analysis reflects both a remarkable ability to synthesize and a capacity to render complex problems in an elegant, readable form. His broad knowledge of sixteenth-century literary traditions is apparent throughout the volume.

Both Daniel Martin and Floyd Gray have produced inventive, learned books on rhetoric and gender, albeit from quite different perspectives. "These are difficult questions with no easy nor definitive answers," notes Gray after a sequence of queries about gender and print culture. "Just asking them may be enough, especially if they turn out to be some of the right questions" (3). Readers will determine whether or not the questions Martin and Gray raise are the "right" ones, but to this reviewer's mind, each book addresses important and timely issues and should be of keen interest to all students of French sixteenth-century literature and culture.