The Ideas of Man and Woman in Renaissance France: Print, Rhetoric, and Law (review)

Lyndan Warner promises a path-breaking study by exploring for the first time the fundamental connections between two major literary and cultural topics: the Querelle des femmes, on the nature of woman, and the Renaissance debate on the dignity and misery of man. The Ideas of Man and Woman in Renaissance France fulfils this ambitious promise admirably. Warner highlights the inadequacy of categorizing Renaissance writing about the female sex according to the usual binary, ‘pro-women’/‘misogynist’. This distinction fails to recognize that commonplaces praising or blaming women’s nature often originate in wider debates of Renaissance moral philosophy, including those on the dignity and misery of man. Moreover, the traffic was not simply one way. Writers on human nature complaining about the follies of man often incorporated extensive examples of womanly virtue to undermine the weakness of men. In other words, rather than take a firm stance for or against women, French Renaissance writers and their readers were fascinated by the potential to argue in utramque partem, for and against the moral excellence of both sexes. Warner demonstrates this brilliantly through examining the sixteenth-century French book trade to the 1550s, and by surveying pleadings from the Parlement de Paris towards the 1600s. She illustrates sharply the adaptability of humanist exempla from one genre to another. According to the interests of their clientele, booksellers sometimes packaged the works of Speroni, Marconville, or Tahureau as Querelle des femmes texts; at other times they marketed these works as collections, miscellanies, or as a series of dialogues on diverse topics. Meanwhile, in the Parlement de Paris, lawyers would lace their pleadings abundantly with loci drawn not only from traditional sources (biblical, classical, patristic) but also from contemporary Querelle des femmes literature to intensify the advantageous points of a case; they knew that judges could be swayed by moral arguments as much as by any reasoning from customary laws, royal edicts, Roman law, or even canon law. Warner’s findings are arresting and their implications far-reaching. She demonstrates cogently that the Querelle des femmes was more than a literary battle between the forces of misogyny and feminism. It had wider significance in Renaissance rhetorical exploration of contrary voices, contradictory opinions, and neglected truths, all of which magnified the social importance of marriage and rank. Similarly, the literature of the dignity and misery of man moved haphazardly from a genre that had its origin in the creation story of Genesis to a more varied account of human civilizations, ancient and modern, introducing new notes of moral relativism. In short, this excellent study makes simultaneous original contributions to our understanding of moral philosophy, feminism, the book trade, and legal practice in early modern France. The layout is clear, although switching between French and English in the titles of primary texts can occasionally be distracting. Nonetheless, Warner’s book will appeal to those with an advanced understanding of early modern feminism, and deserves to be read alongside the studies of Susan Broomhall, Linda Timmermans, and Ian Maclean.