Le Palais des Nobles Dames (Lyon, 1534) (review)

In this "little feminist book" (5,667 verses) and catalogue of famous women in the manner of Boccaccio's De claris mulieribus and Christine de Pizan's Cité des dames, Jehan Du Pré describes an allegorical palace divided into thirteen loci, or places of memory: a basse court, a gallery, ten rooms, and a garden. Each holds a group of ladies: those renowned for their physical prowess, scientific inventions, chastity, marital fidelity, natural beauty, abstinence, diligence, frugality, and longevity. There are even two rooms for those who gave birth in unnatural ways or died in childbirth. Dedicated to Marguerite de Navarre, the work begins with a letter to her and ends with a poem in her honor. Indeed, editor Brenda Dunn-Lardeau attributes Du Pré's chivalrous impulse ("élan chevaleresque") to adopt a pro-female stance in the Querelle des femmes to his meetings with Louise de Savoie and Marguerite de Navarre. Although she finds Du Pré "without hatred or animosity towards women," she describes his feminism as "inconsistent, sometimes avant-garde, more often traditional, and only rarely departing from the masculine point of view" (my translation, 68). His originality, she claims, lies in his ability to recognize women's roles in childbirth and in war and peace negotiations, and, especially, in his sympathetic portrayal of older women, a "remarkable" departure from the typically unflattering portraits of the Middle Ages and early Renaissance (69).

In her well-written and well-researched introduction, Dunn-Lardeau not only outlines Du Pré's role in the Querelle des femmes as a "traditionalist on certain points and innovator on others," but she also carefully analyzes each part of the Palais and its probable sources and examines where the work fits in the tradition of literary temples like those of Jean Lemaire de Belges and Clément Marot and Renaissance arts of memory (21–28, 59). In two of her copious footnotes to the volume, she clearly demonstrates that Du Pré borrowed his erudition, as evidenced in the list of "authors" at the beginning of the work, in large part from Ravisius Textor's De memorabilis et claris mulieribus (1521) and Lemaire's Illustrations de Gaule et singularitez de Troye (1511–13). Although a very few footnotes are disappointingly general (e.g., she offers "Les différentes Vénus correspondent à divers aspects de l'amour" as an explanation for Venus's "ceston," 206, n. 4), most, like those cited above, are detailed, informative, and helpful for specialists and non-specialists alike.

Another of the many strengths of the edition is an exhaustive, eighty-eight-page glossary with its own introduction and a bibliography of seven dictionaries and twenty-two reference works, also included in the general bibliography at the end of the volume. The editor counts 42,787 "word occurrences" in the Palais and glosses 1,506 "difficult in form or meaning" (355), although a few words glossed for spelling and meaning seem rather transparent even for nonspecialists. To reveal how the medieval tradition of compilation literature continued into the sixteenth century, Dunn-Lardeau provides an index of over 1,000 proper names cited in Du Pré's text, divided by sex (M or F) and place (L = lieu), and indicates the famous women who also appear in Boccaccio's De claris mulieribus, in the feminist works of Jean Bouchet, Le Sylvain, and Ravisius Textor, and in Les Controverses des sexes masculin et feminin (1534) of the anti-feminist Gratien Du Pont. The volume is attractive and well presented with several original "xylographs," or engravings, interspersed throughout. It would be difficult to imagine a more complete or scholarly treatment of this pro-female, encyclopedic work finally available in a modern edition.