Louise Labé

Abstract

Louise Labé (c. b. 1522–d. 1566) is the most well-known and celebrated woman writer of non-noble birth from the French Renaissance. While her published work (Œuvres, 1555) is modest in length, the variety of genres she employs (epistle, sonnet, elegy, prose dialogue), the robust evidence of her proto-feminist vocation, her strength of voice, and her mastery of Petrarchan and Neoplatonic conventions have made of her a hugely important figure in the literature of this period. Labé was born in the early 1520s to a family of wealthy rope makers in Lyon, a city at the crossroads of the burgeoning cultural Renaissance given its situation between Paris and Italy. Daughter of Pierre Charly and second wife Étiennette Roybet who died shortly after Labé’s birth, Louise received an uncommonly thorough humanist education, most probably in a convent setting (Le couvent de la Déserte), where it is conjectured she may have been sent by her very young stepmother. The volume that Labé published with one of the premier printing houses of her day (Jean de Tournes) offers a stunning trove of evidence in both prose and poetry of a female writer’s negotiation of the literary and social conventions that challenged learned women of this time. The Œuvres are prefaced by the epistolary dedication to the young Lyonnais noblewoman, Clémence de Bourges, a manifesto for women’s participation in letters wherein she implores the ladies of Lyon to look above their distaffs and join the writer’s enterprise. This call to writing is followed by a much lengthier but no less fiercely gendered Débat de Folie et d’Amour (Debate of folly and love), a mythological play that enacts many of the epistle’s issues in allegorical form. Following the debate are three elegies and a sonnet cycle of twenty-four poems, all manifesting a deep engagement with contemporary literary conventions as told in a consciously feminine voice: In her poetic work Labé inscribes on several occasions her regional sisterhood (ô Dames Lionnoises). Labé’s final sonnet (and final words in the Œuvres) serves as both an entreaty and an apology to the women she invites into her literary project. On the very next page begins the inscription of twenty-four homages to her by male contemporaries, an insurance policy of sorts, against the tide of scandal and criticism attached to her work and reputation. Their success continues to be the subject of some debate, as Louise Labé has endured centuries of both criticism and praise, shifting most dramatically in 2006 with the proposition that her works were not at all hers but cooked up by a clever male collaborative. Such is the legacy of a powerful woman writer at odds with 16th-century social and literary conventions and norms of gender.