Tracing the Fortune of Lady Reason in the Sixteenth Century: Representations in Women's Prose Literature

Abstract

In Christine de Pizan's Livre de fa Cite des Dames (1404), it was Lady Reason who drew the protagonist Christine from her depression and desire to have been born male, after reading the fourteenth-century tirade against women by Matheolus. Lady Reason re-interpreted misogynist histories of women, re-casting female protagonists in a new, positive light. Christine's revisioning of women's status and the entire works image offemale support and solidarity were models for future women writers to follow. Although few acknowledged Pizan as a literary precedent, some sixteenth-century women writers took up the strands of her argument and continued to develop her ideal. The inheritors of the Cite des Dames appropriated the character Lady Reason to suit their own literary or didactic purposes. This article will discuss the development of the role and character of Lady Reason in the manuscript and printed works of sixteenth-century French womcn writers. In the early sixteenth century, medieval allegorical devices such as dreams and gardens were still commonly used in the works of the rhetoriqueurs. They drew on classical and Christian figures to emphasise the essential moral function of their work. l In the allegorical tradition of the rhetoriqueur school, Reason was depicted in some form as a character in the works of four sixteenth-century women writers, three of whom have received very little attention in current literary discussions. The writings of both Katherine d' Amboise and Gabrielle de Bourbon in which Reason is present, remain in manuscript to the present day and the published works of Marie Ie Gendre have not been reprinted in their entirety since the sixteenth century.2 Despite the lack of recent discussion regarding their work, all three writers make considerable contributions in re-evaluating the contemporary image of the allegorical character Reason, and her role as a guide to women, on a journey of selfdiscovery and understanding. Their asscssment of their own capacities as literate women both reading and living in sixteenth-century culture is an invaluable addition to historical and literary analysis of women's literature, self-perception and strategies of resistance in this period.