Euvres de Louïze Labé Lionnoize

by Louise Labé

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work.

This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.

As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

501 pages, Paperback

First published March 26, 2012

About the author

The precise date of Louise Labé's birth is unknown. She is born somewhere between 1516 (her parents marriage) and 1523 (her mother's death).
Both her father and her stepmother Antoinette Taillard (whom Pierre Charly married following Etiennette Roybet's death in 1523) were illiterate, but Labé 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 Scève. Her Œuvres 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 Scève, 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 Labé (along with several other women) as his beloved; and from the nineteenth century onward, literary critics speculated that Magny was in fact Labé's lover. However, the male beloved in Labé'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 Labé's husband (who had died by 1557), and by extension Labé herself.
In 1564, the plague broke out in Lyon, taking the lives of some of Labé'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.
[edit:]Debated connection with "la Belle Cordière"
From 1584, the name of Louise Labé became associated with a courtesan called "la Belle Cordière" (first described by Philibert de Vienne in 1547; the association with Labé was solidified by Antoine Du Verdier in 1585).
This courtesan was a colorful and controversial figure during her own lifetime. In 1557 a popular song on the scandalous behavior of La Cordière 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 Labé 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 1584.
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.

Reviews

[SuzanneNM]

3.5⭐️
Certaines formulations sont très belles, certaines m’ont moins parlé (sans doute à cause du langage du XVIe siècle). J’ai notamment eu un peu de mal avec certaines Élégies ; cependant les sonnets sont très réfléchis et m’ont beaucoup plu.

[Nathan Albright]

There is something sad and seemingly inevitable about this book and its context.  The author was a southern French woman who married but had a lover and then took another lover when the first was detained and found her reputation shot when one of her discarded lovers decided to blow her cover and tell her husband that she had been faithful and the other lover wrote about her as one of the most noted courtesans of her time.  Ouch.  Making it all the more painful is that the author herself predicted that her reputation would be shot.  Nevertheless, this realization that her conduct would cause her name to suffer did not prevent the author from behaving in a more decorous manner and remaining faithful to her husband, which would have preserved her good name for history and would have avoided being shamed for centuries.  It is altogether easier to recognize what is right and proper to do than to do it, and the price for knowing ahead of time that one faces ruin for one's behavior but not being able to control one's behavior is a deeply sad fate, in that one is ruined both in anticipation and then in reality.

This book is a relatively short one, coming in at around seventy pages.  The first part of the book consists of a biographical essay that discusses the tragic life of the writer.  The editor of this collection appears to want to encourage the reader to feel sympathy for the prophetic abilities of the author who accurately prophesied doom upon herself, but while I feel a sense of futility I am not particularly sympathetic to the fate of an adulteress who received her just desserts.  The rest of the book consists of sonnets in both French (on the left side) and in English translation (on the right) that demonstrate the author as a learned woman who was certainly capable of recognizing the parallels between her own behavior and the morality of the heathen ages of the classical era.  If the morality of these poems is not something I appreciated or supported, the author is certainly intelligent enough that she would have made for a witty conversation partner and who probably was smart enough to know better if a bit too young and foolhardy to care about the inevitable result of her behavior.

If we wish to be wiser than the author, it is possible for us to recognize where she went wrong and to reflect on how the author should have been aware that she was engaged in folly.  For one, the author chooses to write about her amours openly and passionately, making it clear that she is not writing about her husband and giving herself a reputation of being outspoken, which is not always the best sort of reputation to give oneself if one wants to avoid trouble.  The author could have taken a clue from the danger of using so many heathen deities in her writings, for the moral tone of the heathen deities was far lower than that of the Bible.  She should have seen that she was departing from the path of virtue and wisdom before she wrote enough sonnets to create a book of doomed erotic love, but the author is unfortunately not a wise person and best serves the contemporary reader as an object lesson in how smart people can do very dumb things and by their lack of control give themselves a bad reputation and a bad name for centuries.  That is a fate most of us would like to avoid, obviously.