Querelle des Femmes, La. In its narrow sense, this term refers to a genre of writing in Latin and French in which the superiority of one or the other sex is proposed. The earliest examples are found c.1200, and the genre as such declined markedly after 1650. It attracted few prominent writers, and was largely governed by the rules of demonstrative rhetoric. In arguing the case for or against the superiority of women, writers may employ exclusively historical examples, as does Boccaccio's De claris mulieribus (composed 1360-74; translated several times into French), which is the prototype for many subsequent catalogues of famous women; or they may combine example with the rehearsal of theological, legal, and medical ‘proofs’ of excellence and with agreement from authority in the form of quotations from the ancients, the Bible, and the Church Fathers. The most accomplished and influential example of the latter type is Cornelius Agrippa's De nobilitate et praecellentia foeminei sexus (composed in 1509, published in 1529; translated into French in 1530).
From its beginnings, the Querelle is associated with clerical misogyny and misogamy, and many of its most notable contributions were written by clerics. It is also linked to female literary patronage and literary production, as in the cases of Christine de Pizan, Boccaccio, Agrippa, Marguerite de Navarre, Marie de Romieu (1581), Marie de Gournay, and Jacquette Guillaume (1668).
Throughout the 16th and early 17th c. there was a steady stream of contributions to the debate, the most notable being those produced by Gratien du Pont (1534), François de Billon (1553), Jean de Marconville (1564), and Alexis Trousset, alias Jacques Olivier, whose infamous but highly successful Alphabet de l'imperfection et malice des femmes (1617) reproduces in expanded form an alphabet of female vices composed by a 15th-c. Florentine archbishop. One of those to reply to Trousset was Marie de Gournay, whose Égalité des hommes et des femmes (1622) marks the shift of interest from rhetorical argument to the practical question of female education. This issue arises again in the exchange of letters between Rivet and Anna Maria van Schurman, published in Latin in 1638 and in French in 1646, and is central to the various feminist works of Poulain de la Barre (1673-5), which are inspired by a Cartesian approach and mark the end of the Querelle des Femmes as such.
In the broader sense, the Querelle des Femmes encompasses all writing in which the relative merits of the sexes are discussed using arguments and material drawn from the more narrowly defined debate. Thus, the Querelle has been traced in the anti-feminist opinions expressed in Jean de Meun's contribution to the Roman de la Rose, opposed by Martin Lefranc's Le Champion des dames (1442); in the works of Rabelais, notably in the academic debate about the nature of women and marriage which takes place in Chapters 29-36 of the Tiers Livre; in the Heptaméron of Marguerite de Navarre, especially in the discussion of Christian marriage; in the Neoplatonist debate about the court lady between the poets Bertrand de la Borderie, Charles Fontaine, and Antoine Héroët (1541-2); in Desportes's misogynist ‘Stances du mariage’ of 1571, which provoke a number of defences of women and marriage up to the end of the 16th c.; finally, in the opinions and arguments of some of Molière's barbons, notably Arnolphe in L'École des femmes (1662). [See also Feminism; Preciosity.]
[Ian Maclean]
Bibliography
- M. Angenot, Les Champions des femmes (1977)
- I. Maclean, Woman Triumphant (1977)
