Louise Labé

Louise Labé. Engraving by Pierre Woeiriot, 1555

Louise Labé, (c. 1520 or 1522, Lyon - April 25, 1566, Parcieux-en-Dombes), also identified as La Belle Cordière, was a female French poet of the Renaissance, born at Lyon, the daughter of a rich ropemaker, Pierre Charly, and his second wife, Etiennette Roybet. A recent book has argued that she was not an actual historical person, but a feminist creation of a number of French poets of the Renaissance (see below).

Biography

Both her father and her stepmother Antoinette Taillard (whom Pierre Charly married following Etiennette Roybet's death in 1523) were illiterate, but Labe received an education in Latin, Italian and music, perhaps in a convent school. At the siege of Perpignan, or in a tournament there, she is said to have dressed in male clothing and fought on horseback in the ranks of the Dauphin, afterwards Henry II. Between 1543 and 1545 she married Ennemond Perrin, a ropemaker. She became active in a circle of Lyonnais poets and humanists grouped around the figure of Maurice Sceve. Her Euvres were printed in 1555, by the renowned Lyonnais printer Jean de Tournes. In addition to her own writings, the volume contained twenty-four poems in her honor, authored by her male contemporaries and entitled Escriz de divers poetes, a la louenge de Louize Labe Lionnoize. The authors of these praise poems (not all of whom can be reliably identified) include Maurice Sceve, Pontus de Tyard, Claude de Taillemont, Clement Marot, Olivier de Magny, Jean-Antoine de Baif, Mellin de Saint-Gelais, Antoine du Moulin, and Antoine Fumee. The poet Olivier de Magny, in his Odes of 1559, praised Labe (along with several other women) as his beloved; and from the nineteenth century onward, literary critics speculated that Magny was in fact Labe's lover. However, the male beloved in Labe's poetry is never identified by name, and may well represent a poetic fiction rather than a historical person. Magny's Odes also contained a poem (A Sire Aymon) that mocked and belittled Labe's husband (who had died by 1557), and by extension Labe herself. In 1564, the plague broke out in Lyon, taking the lives of some of Labe's friends. In 1565, suffering herself from bad health, she retired to the home of her friend Thomas Fortin, a banker from Florence, who witnessed her will (a document that is extant). She died in 1566, and was buried on her country property close to Parcieux-en-Dombes, outside Lyon.

Labe was a colorful and controversial figure during her own lifetime. In 1557 a popular song on the scandalous behavior of La Cordiere was published in Lyon, and 1560 Jean Calvin referred to her cross-dressing and called her a plebeia meretrix or common whore. Debate on whether or not she was or was not a courtesan began in the sixteenth century, and has continued up to the present day. However, in recent decades, critics have focused increasing attention on her literary works.

Her Œuvres include two prose works: a feminist preface, urging women to write, that is dedicated to a young noblewoman of Lyon, Clemence de Bourges; and a dramatic allegory in prose entitled Debat de Folie et d'Amour, which draws on Erasmus' Praise of Folly. Her poetry consists of three Elegies in the style of the Heroides of Ovid, and twenty-four sonnets that draw on the traditions of Neoplatonism and Petrarchism. The Debat, the most popular of her works in the sixteenth century, inspired one of the fables of Jean de la Fontaine and was translated into English by Robert Greene in 1608. The sonnets, remarkable for their frank eroticism, have been her most famous works following the early modern period, and were translated into German by Rainer Maria Rilke.

The Huchon hypothesis

In her 2006 book Louise Labé: une créature de papier (Droz), the eminent Sorbonne professor Mireille Huchon maintains that Louise Labé was an imaginary creation by the Lyonnais poets Maurice Scève, Olivier de Magny, Claude de Taillemont, Jacques Peletier du Mans, Guillaume des Autels, and others, and by the publisher Jean de Tournes capitalizing on the period's literary fascination with the classical poet Sappho and on a publication (1533) of poems attributed to Petrarch's "Laura" (Laura de Sade; the poems were in fact the work of a descendant of Laura).^[1] The name "Louise" may have been coined by Clément Marot when, in 1542, seeking a French equivalent of Petrarch's praise of "Laura", he proposed to the Lyonnais circle that they "louer Louise" (praise Louise). According to Huchon, the courtesan Louise Labé did exist, but did not write the poems attributed to her. One critic Marc Fumaroli called Huchon's argument "irrefutable" in a book review in Le Monde.^[2]

However, other critics do not concur with Huchon's view. First, her theory, although intriguing, remains speculative; she reinterprets existing historical documents, rather than citing new evidence. Second, Labe's corpus does contain verbal echoes of works by Sceve and other writers in his circle. These echoes, typical of Renaissance practices of intertextuality, indicate that Labe collaborated and interacted with her poetic contemporaries, but they do not necessarily indicate that her contemporaries went so far as to ghost-write her works. Finally, a unique stylistic voice and a remarkable consistency of vocabulary and themes are found throughout all of Labe's different texts, a phenomenon that renders it unlikely that the texts were composed by more than one person.^[3] The debate is ongoing.

Notes

1. ^ Mireille Huchon (2006) Louise Labé: une créature de papier (Droz).
2. ^ Fumaroli, Le Monde, May 5, 2006.
3. ^ The French webpage entitled "Louise Labé attaquée!" ("Louise Labe attacked!") at [1] is collecting published responses to Huchon's book and making them available online. Scholars who disagree with part or all of Huchon's theory include Emmanuel Buron, "Claude de Taillemont et les Escriz de divers Poëtes à la louenge de Louïze Labé Lionnoize. Discussion critique de Louise Labé, une créature de papier, de Mireille Huchon," L'Information littéraire 2, 2006, p. 38-46 ([2]); Henri Hours and Bernard Plessy, "Sur Louise Labé, rien de nouveau," Le Bulletin des Lettres, October 2006, p. 3-5 ([3]); Madeleine Lazard, "Droit de réponse envoyé au Monde des livres, non publié" ([4]); Daniel Martin, "Louise Labé est-elle ‘une creature de papier’?" Réforme, Humanisme, Renaissance 63, December 2006, p. 7-37 ([5]); and Eliane Viennot, "Notice sur Louise Labé," Théâtre de femmes de l’Ancien Régime, December 2006, p. 377-379 ([6]).

References

• (French) Marc Fumaroli's review of Mireille Huchon's book, published in Le Monde, May 5, 2006
• Louise Labe, Complete Poetry and Prose, ed. and trans. Deborah Lesko Baker and Annie Finch, University of Chicago Press, 2006.
• (French) Louise Labe, Œuvres completes, ed. Francois Rigolot, Flammarion, 2004. Critical edition and biographical chronology.
• (French) Madeleine Lazard, Louise Labe Lyonnaise, Librairie Artheme Fayard, 2004. Biography.

External links

• (French) Biography, by Françoise Charpentier
• (French) Biography, Analysis
• University of Virginia's Gordon Project Louise Labe page Contains digital images of a 1556 edition of her works and background information.

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Louise Labé

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