Writing Places: Sixteenth-Century City Culture and the Des Roches Salon (review)

Kendall B. Tarte has written a richly documented and sometimes surprising book on literary city culture in late sixteenth-century France, which takes as its starting point the celebrated literary salon of Madeleine and Catherine Des Roches. The Poitiers salon that emerges from her discussion is one that was fundamentally grounded in the city and in the political events that occurred there in the 1570s: namely, the ultimately unsuccessful Protestant siege in 1569 and the special court sessions that took place in 1579, the Grands Jours de Poitiers, designed to clear up the backlog of unresolved cases following the regional unrest, and to reaffirm the authority of the king in a city where the aristocracy had begun to take political and legal liberties. This situating of the salon in its civic, regional, national and political contexts is the guiding thread of the book, and allows it to cover a lot of ground. The chapters unfold from the salon itself and the famous publication that originated there: La Puce de Madame Des-Roches (1582), a collaborative venture by visitors to the salon on the theme of a flea glimpsed on Catherine’s breast by visiting lawyer Estienne Pasquier. Contributions came from Catherine, her mother Madeleine and other poet-jurists up in Poitiers for the Grands Jours. Many of the contributions take the form of blasons anatomiques, and Tarte shows how these poetic explorations of the female body resemble topographical explorations of cities and of landscapes. The Puce poets combine topographical and legal discourses, and this bringing together of literature and the law is very successful. From the salon and the courts, the analysis proceeds outwards in concentric circles, focusing next on the wider city, and on how Poitiers itself was represented and depicted in geography, cartography and poetry of the period. In this account, Tarte returns frequently to the association of landscape and the human body, modulating the points made in the earlier chapters about the female body as landscape. In its move towards historical writing, the book takes in the significance of narrative point of view in histories of the siege of Poitiers in both Protestant and Catholic accounts. After focusing on the salon, the body, the city and contemporary history, Tarte returns to the writings of the Des Roches, arguing that they, in ways unusual for contemporary women, commented explicitly and boldly on political, religious and historical events. Here, Madeleine comes to the fore, as an outspoken and committed historical writer. The final chapter considers a more familiar aspect of the Des Roches salon as the construction of a literary community that includes female literary predecessors as well as semi-mythological female figures. This is a rewarding book, which goes beyond the usual critical topics and commonplaces around sixteenth-century women’s writing.