Gender, Rhetoric and Print Culture in French Renaissance Writing (review)

Gray, Floyd. Gender, Rhetoric and Print Culture in French Renaissance Writing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Pp. vii + 227.

In this thought-provoking contribution to early modern French scholarship, Floyd Gray challenges the validity of certain "feminist," "cultural" and "contextual" critical approaches to Renaissance literature on the grounds that they "avoid the cultural reality or blur the rhetorical conditions in which . . . [Renaissance texts] were written"(2). Gray cautions readers to resist "current" tendencies to treat Renaissance texts as transparent historical documents from which one can extrapolate reliable information about early modern society and culture, or as autobiographical evidence of the authors' personal lives and beliefs. Thus, in order to properly assign meaning to Renaissance texts, one must first consider the works in their inherent literariness, taking into account the context in which they were crafted by the authors, the vast majority of whom were highly skilled wordsmiths who addressed their writing to an audience familiar with the rules of rhetoric. For Gray, then, the very notion of context must itself be subject to contextualization in its critical application to Renaissance texts, the production of which was informed not only by socio-economic, political, and cultural factors, but also and perhaps most importantly by the textual environment in which they were conceived and received. Gray aims not only to correct critical fallacies, but also to instruct contemporary readers about the role of rhetoric in early modern textual production. The first chapter, especially, presents a fair amount of background about Renaissance rhetorical theory and pedagogical method. Throughout the book, Gray examines the interaction between rhetoric and gender issues in what he terms "marginal or marginalizing discourses (i.e. misogynist, feminist, autobiographical, homosexual and medical)" (2) as they are figured in a selection of representative texts. A corollary subject of Gray's book is the impact of early modern print culture on the choice and presentation of gendered topics in French Renaissance writing. In spite of its parallel placement in the title of the book, however, this final topic is not accorded the same thorough treatment as the others. Moreover, despite Gray's passing mention of the weaknesses of "cultural" and "contextual" criticism, it seems clear that the real intended target of his critique is contemporary feminist scholarship.

In the first chapter, Gray argues that, with the exception of Christine de Pisan's noteworthy contribution, the phenomenon known as the "Querelle des femmes," a protracted debate between defenders and detractors of the nature and status of women, was more a rhetorical construct than a reality—a kind of literary exercise that served to showcase the predominately male authors' skills in persuasive argumentation as they argued for and against a chosen topic, in this case, women. According to Gray, what has been missing in contemporary "feminist" analysis of the Querelle is an appreciation of its rhetorical origins, namely that of "humanist pedagogical methodologies concerning and regulating agonistic and encomiastic literature"(14). Gray sets out to demonstrate that both feminist and antifeminist texts in the debate can be read as fundamentally paradoxical in manner and method. To the extent that the authors "develop the logic of their argument exhaustively, almost to the point of absurdity"(12), there is a playful dimension to the texts that problematizes the socio-cultural relevance of their content. Although Gray's investigation of the rhetorical underpinnings of the Querelle is highly instructive, his insistence on limiting the relevance of the debate in this chapter to the confines of its rhetorical framing would seem to minimize the impact that a contemporary female readership may have had at the time. In Gray's own words, it was an "ultimate" and "inevitable" consequence that women would come to read the texts "otherwise"—that is to say, counter to the intentions of the authors, leading one to wonder to what degree female readers of the period failed, or even refused, to read the rhetorically driven texts as they were intended to be read...