The Ideas of Man and Woman in Renaissance France

Print, Rhetoric, and Law

Lyndan Warner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317027997
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Storia mondiale

The Ideas of Man and Woman in Renaissance France provides the first comprehensive comparison of the printed debates in the 1500s over the superiority or inferiority of woman - the Querelle des femmes - and the dignity and misery of man. Analysing these writings side by side, Lyndan Warner reveals the extent to which Renaissance authors borrowed commonplaces from both traditions as they praised or blamed man or woman and habitually considered opposite and contrary points of view. In the law courts reflections on the virtues and vices of man and woman had a practical application-to win cases-and as Warner demonstrates, Parisian lawyers employed this developing rhetoric in family disputes over inheritance and marriage, and amplified it in the published versions of their pleadings. Tracing these ideas and modes of thinking from the writer's quill to the workshops and boutiques of printers and booksellers, Warner uses probate inventories to follow the books to the households of their potential male and female readers. Warner reveals the shifts in printed discussions of human nature from the 1500s to the early 1600s and shows how booksellers adapted the ways they marketed and sold new genres such as essays and lawyers' pleadings.

Chapter 1
Introduction

The Ideas of Man and Woman in Renaissance France

One of the values we hold most fundamental in modern life is the dignity of the human condition. The preamble to the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights refers to the ‘inherent dignity’ of all humans and the first article of the declaration states that ‘[a]ll human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights’. In the Renaissance, only certain persons of noble blood possessed dignity through birth. For most in sixteenth-century France dignity or dignitas was a status to be achieved or an honour to be earned, often through a virtuous life carrying out a public duty or office. The Renaissance idea of the dignity of man also drew upon the story of God’s creation of Adam and his place in the universe. Renaissance writers engaged in a vigorous debate about whether Eve, as a woman created from Adam’s rib, shared in this dignity and questioned the role she played in the introduction of human misery to the world. From the moment God expelled Adam and Eve from Paradise for sinning, the potential of humans to attain dignity was constantly threatened by a weakness – perhaps a penchant – for vice. This oscillation between dignity and misery, between virtue and vice, was ever present in Renaissance culture. Moral literature and ‘histories’ written in the early modern period dwell on the contradictions and paradoxes in the lives of men and women. While dignity might be taken for granted as a human right in the modern world, Renaissance moral treatises constantly reminded male and female readers of their precarious grip on dignity because of this shared human tendency to vice.

These Renaissance debates pondered man’s capacity to recover his dignity through virtuous effort or challenged whether Adam and his descendants would be forever mired in vice, misery and folly. The reflections on man’s position relative to the heavens and to the creatures of the earth and the seas were major preoccupations of Renaissance literature printed in the 1500s. And just as Adam had a companion in Eve, ‘Renaissance man’ was often accompanied by a woman, a femme, which in French carries the double meaning of both woman and wife. Numerous books questioned the relationship of woman to man. Was she inferior, superior or his equal? This Renaissance quarrel of the sexes, now known as the Querelle des femmes, spurred numerous bestsellers for the bookstalls in Paris and Lyon from the 1530s through to the 1550s and persisted in various printed genres to the end of the century.

The academic disciplines of intellectual history and women’s and gender history have tended to separate the study of the dignity and misery of man from the debate on the nature of woman called the Querelle des femmes. This book, by contrast, underlines the continuities between the Renaissance ideas of man and woman. Considering man at the height of his dignity or suffering in abject misery or contemplating woman as the most excellent of all creatures or as frail, weak and inferior, reveals the sixteenth-century mental habit of exploring both sides of an argument, the pro et contra or pros and cons. We begin to understand the texts of the Querelle des femmes considering the superiority or inferiority of woman not as separate entities to be weighed by their ‘feminism’ or their ‘misogyny’ but as contiguous with contemporary writings on the excellence and frailty of man. This comparison shifts our understanding when we recognise how in the early sixteenth century there was a two-way street between the Querelle des femmes and the debate on the dignity and misery of man. It changes the parameters of the discussion when we begin to understand how many writers such as Agrippa, Champier or Boaistuau crossed over from, imitated or borrowed examples from one side to the other.

The Querelle des femmes, like the debate on the dignity and misery of man, did not remain static. In the mid- to late sixteenth-century writers such as Louise Labé or Montaigne moved beyond the usual approaches to the debates on man and woman to focus on the vagaries of human nature. The second half of this book traces the durability of the ideas of man and woman and their evolution through to the end of the 1500s in a range of printed formats from dialogues, to moral lessons, essays and the speeches of lawyers.

Relating the Renaissance Dignity and Misery of Man to the Querelle des femmes

Most landmark studies of the idea of human dignity centred on the Italian Renaissance and therefore tended to ignore the abundant sixteenth-century French satires, dialogues, paradoxes and essays on the misery of the human condition.1 The religious civil wars, which broke out intermittently in France from 1562 to the mid-1590s, contributed to sixteenth-century preoccupations with human misery and concerns about the diversity of opinion.2 Some scholars have recognised how the focus on optimism and human potential distorts our picture of the Renaissance world-view and have balanced these statements of the ‘philosophy of man’ with the many sources of pessimism in early modern thought.3 An exceptionally clear account of Renaissance moral philosophy managed to trace the de dignitate et miseria hominis tradition across Europe and its collective origins in classical, biblical, patristic and medieval sources.4

Meanwhile the study of dignity-of-man literature in Renaissance France began in earnest in the 1970s.5 By the early 1980s, critical editions of the sixteenth-century French ‘bestsellers’ on human misery and dignity, known as the ‘ample discourse on human miseries’ and the ‘brief discourse on the excellence and dignity of man’ opened up a discussion of how Renaissance writers could both praise and blame the human condition.6 The way French sixteenth-century writers considered both dignity and misery in turn has been interpreted as a Christian humanist ‘meditation on man’.7 None of the studies by these distinguished scholars of Renaissance Europe, however, nor a group of scholars meeting for a colloquium on the theme of the Renaissance dignity of man in the 1990s, thought to make the leap to early modern ideas about woman.8 There have been intermittent attempts to highlight the idea of woman within the tradition of the history of ideas, most notably by Maryanne Horowitz’s conceptual work in the 1970s and 1980s, Prudence Allen’s meticulous chronological research in the 1980s and 1990s, and more recent work on the ‘woman question’ as it relates to early modern scepticism.9

In the 1970s, ‘second-wave’ feminism renewed interest and scholarship on the Querelle des femmes as an early form of ‘feminism’.10 Since the 1980s the proliferation of books on Renaissance woman has compensated for the lack of attention to ‘woman’ within discussions of the philosophies of ‘Renaissance man’. Scholars of ‘Renaissance woman’ have scoured the sources for early sparks of ‘feminism’ or passages and texts that defended and promoted women as virtuous or as heroines.11 Renaissance defences of women written by men and women have benefited now from several decades of scholarship on women’s history and restoring the ‘other voice in early modern Europe’.

In the late 1980s feminist theorists, literary critics and historians began to reassess the categories of man, woman, sex and gender identities and in 1989 scholars established the Journal of Women’s History as well as the journal Gender & History.12 Social and cultural historians began to investigate the processes and ideas that contributed to identifying ‘masculinity’ and ‘femininity’ or ‘manhood’ and ‘womanhood’. For the early modern period studies of masculinity have focused on ideas of sexuality, the body, hermaphroditism or how to establish oneself from youth to manhood rather than on the concept of man in relation to his fellow beings in the heavens, the seas and on earth.13

In the early 1990s careful, comparative research on the literature of the woman question across Renaissance England, France and Italy began to emerge.14 A monumental work placed women of the French Renaissance in the context of existing laws, socially stratified roles and access to education.15 More recently, the Querelle des femmes has been studied in the context of the invention of the Salic law requiring a male heir to the French royal throne and thereby analysing female access to political power in the early modern period.16

Each of these approaches has informed and shaped the research for this book, but it remains evident that the Renaissance ideas of man and woman could benefit from a comparative approach. Books on ‘Renaissance woman’ and on early forms of ‘feminism’ – although vital and necessary amendments to the historical picture – have continued to isolate the debate on the nature of woman from the rest of moralist literature on human nature.17 A recent conference proposing to ‘revisit the Querelle des femmes’ set as its theme the ‘Discourses on the inequality/equality of men and women between 1400 and 1600’. Yet despite the theme inviting a comparison, the programme focused exclusively on aspects of the debate about woman.18 This is not to ignore the fact that there were some treatises restricted to a discussion of the nature of woman, the texts known collectively as the Querelle des femmes. Yet it is important to remember how these books were sold, how purchasers often arranged to have several works of moral philosophy bound together,19 and how the Querelle texts draw on and imitate the dignity and misery-of-man examples and commonplaces. Like the dignity and misery-of-man commonplaces, in the early years of the sixteenth century the Querelle des femmes rarely escapes the creation story as an interpretation of man and woman’s place in the world. Likewise man or homme often means human or humain and the moralists describe the human condition rather than specific ideas about the masculine sex, and so it is essential to remain on the lookout for a female presence in these texts. Comparing the techniques and aims of these two bodies of literature reveals the extent to which they overlapped.

Pioneers in the field of gender history, including Gisela Bock and Margarete Zimmermann, have acknowledged the need for more comparative research specific to the ideas of man and woman in the early modern period. They note that the ‘concept’ of the Querelle des femmes refers to ‘an all-encompassing gender debate in which not only women but – a...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Notes on the Text
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Booksellers and the Market to the 1550s
• 3 The Dignity and Misery of Man … and of Woman
• 4 The Querelle des femmes
• 5 The Dialogue: Beyond Dignity and Misery, Beyond the Querelle des femmes
• 6 Diversity, Citation and the Invention of the Essay
• 7 Books in the Palais de Justice and their Readers in the Late 1500s to Early 1600s
• 8 Rhetoric, Print and Lawyers’ Pleadings in the Parlement de Paris
• 9 Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index