Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-l7hp2 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-25T04:49:23.644Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

“Tout mon office:” Body Politics and Family Dynamics in the verse epîtres of Marguerite de Navarre*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Leah Middlebrook
Leah Middlebrook*
Affiliation:
Stanford University
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

“Voylà tout mon office. “

— Marguerite de Navarre, Epître 12 (16)1

Among the writings of Marguerite de Navarre, the intimate epîtres she exchanged with her mother, Louise de Savoie, and brother, François I are relatively unknown. Of moderate literary interest, these poems are most important for the insight they provide into the role of the princess in the complex negotiation of gender and power that was necessary when women sought powers of rule. The epîtres reveal a “division of labor” in the representation of femininity: through the symbolism of the family “trinité” the family distanced Louise from the constraints of gender and embodied existence, displacing the physical and symbolic burden of female flesh onto Marguerite.

Type
Studies
Information
Renaissance Quarterly , Volume 54 , Issue 4-Part1 , Winter 2001 , pp. 1108 - 1141
Copyright
Copyright © Renaissance Society of America 2001

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

D'Angoulême, Marguerite. 1982. L'Heptameron. Ed. Simone Reyff. Paris.Google Scholar
D'Angoulême, Marguerite. 1979. Le Miroir de L'Ame Pecheresse. Ed. Renja Salminen. Helsinki.Google Scholar
Blaisdell, C. J. 1980. “Marguerite de Navarre and Her Circle (French, 1492-1549).” In Female Scholars: A Tradition of Learned Women Before 1800, ed. J. R. Brink, 36-53. Montreal.Google Scholar
Bradford, William, ed. and trans. 1971. The Correspondence of the Emperor Charles the Fifth. New York.Google Scholar
Brownlee, Kevin. 1995. “Widowhood, Sexuality, and Gender in Christine de Pizan.” Romanic Review. 86.2 (March): 339-53.Google Scholar
Calendar of State Papers and Manuscripts Relating to English Affairs, Venice. 1869. Ed. Rawdon Brown. London.Google Scholar
Champollion-Figeac, M. Aime\ ed. 1847. Captiviti du Roi Francois F”. Paris.Google Scholar
Champollion-Figeac, M. Aime\. 1970. Pohies Du Roi Francois F, De Louise De Savoie, Duchesse D’ Angouleme, De Marguerite, Reine de Navarre Et Correspondance Intime Du Roi Avec Diane De Poitiers Et Plusiers Autres Dames De La Cour. Reprint of 1847 ed. Geneva.Google Scholar
Christine de Pizan. 1989a. Le livre des trois vertus. Ed. Charity Cannon Willard and Eric Hicks. Paris.Google Scholar
Christine de Pizan. 1989b. A Medieval Woman's Mirror of Honor: The Treasury of the City of Ladies. Ed. and Trans. Charity Cannon Willard. New York.Google Scholar
Cottrell, Robert D. 1986. The Grammar of Silence: A Reading of Marguerite de Navarre's Poetry. Washington, D.C.Google Scholar
Ferguson, Gary. 1992. Mirroring Belief: Marguerite of Navarre's Devotional Poetry. Edinburgh.Google Scholar
ffolliott, Sheila. 1986. “Catherine de’ Medici as Artemisia: Figuring the Powerful Widow.” In Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourse of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe, ed. Margaret W Ferguson, et al., 227-241. Chicago.Google Scholar
ffolliott, Sheila. 1995. “Exemplarity and Gender. Three lives of Queen Catherine de Medici.” In The Rhetorics of Life-Writing in Early Modern Europe: Forms of Biography from Cassandra Fedele to Louis XIV, ed. Thomas F. Mayer and D. R. Woolf, 321-340. Ann Arbor, MI.Google Scholar
Greene, Thomas M. 1982. The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry. (Elizabethan Series, 7.) New Haven.Google Scholar
Hanley, Sarah. 1994. “The Monarchic State in Early Modern France.” In Politics, Ideology and the Law in Early Modern Europe. Essays in honor of J. H. M. Salmon, ed. Adriana Bakos, 107-26. Rochester, NY.Google Scholar
Hairston, Julia L. 2000. “Skirting the Issue: Machiavelli's Caterina Sforza.” Renaissance Quarterly 53.3: 687–712. New York.Google Scholar
Jourda, Pierre. 1930. Marguerite d’ Angouleme, Duchesse d'Alencon, Reine de Navarre (1492-1549). Etude Biographique et Littiraire. 2 vols. Paris.Google Scholar
Kelly, Joan. 1984. Women, History and Theory: The Essays of Joan Kelly. Chicago.Google Scholar
King, Margaret. 1991. Women of the Renaissance. Chicago.Google Scholar
Knecht, Robert Jean. 1994. Renaissance Warrior and Patron: The Reign of Francis I. Cambridge.Google Scholar
Labé, Louise. 1986. Oeuvres Complètes. Ed. François Rigolot. Paris.Google Scholar
LeCoq, Anne Marie. 1987. François Ier, Imaginaire: symbolique et politique a I'auhe de la Renaissance française. Paris.Google Scholar
Louise de Savoie, . 1838. Journal. In Nouvelle Collection des Memoires pour Servir à L'Histoire de France, ed. Michel Michaud, 87-93. Paris.Google Scholar
Maus, Katherine Eisaman. In Sexuality and gender in early modern Europe: institutions, texts, images, ed. James Grantham Turner, 266-288. Cambridge, England, and New York.Google Scholar
McCartney, Elizabeth. 1998. “The King's Mother and Royal Prerogative in Early Sixteenth-Century France.” In Medieval Queenship, ed. John Carmi Parsons, 117-142. New York.Google Scholar
Montrose, Adrian Louis. 1986. “The Elizabethan Subject and the Spenserian Text.” In Literary Theory/Renaissance Texts, ed. Patricia Parker and David Quint, 303-340. Baltimore, MD and London.Google Scholar
Orth, Myra Dickerman. 1982. “Francis De Moulin and the Journal of Louise of Savoy.” The Sixteenth Century Journal 13.1: 55–66.Google Scholar
Pradel, Pierre. 1986. Anne de France, 1461-1522. Paris.Google Scholar
Roelker, Nancy L. 1979. Jeanne d'Albret, Reine de Navarre, 1528-1572. Paris.Google Scholar
Ronsard, Pierre de. 1981. Les Amours. Ed. Marc Bensimon and James L. Martin. Paris.Google Scholar
Russell, Joycelyne Glehill. 1992. Diplomats at Work: Three Renaissance Studies. Gloucestershire.Google Scholar
Tourault, Philippe. 1990. Anne de Bretagne. Paris.Google Scholar
Willard, Charity Cannon. 1991. “Anne of France, reader of Christine de Pizan.” In The Reception of Christine de Pizan from the Fifteenth Through the Nineteenth Centuries: Visitors to the City, ed. Glenda K. McCloed, 59-70. Lewiston, NY.Google Scholar