Representing Judith in Early Modern French Literature by Kathleen M. Llewellyn (review)

Examining Francophone plays, poems, and printed sermons, Kathleen Llewellyn explores the biblical figure of Judith. Judith’s was a story with many contradictions for early modern audiences, but which allowed writers and readers an imaginative investigation of the possibilities of female power (including sexual power) harnessed for good.

In this slim volume, Llewellyn only partially succeeds in connecting her detailed textual analyses to wider contexts. Although the political, religious, social, and cultural context of sixteenth-century France is alluded to in the Introduction, little is said directly about how it influenced these presentations by Catholic and Protestant writers. Such factors Llewellyn offers as negative female regencies, religious wars, or an apparent preoccupation with death in early modern France are not brought to bear on these particular interpretations. Further, we know little of how these works were selected; as representative of a wider corpus of contemporary texts about Judith, unique examples, or particularly unusual interpretations? This seems key, especially to assessing the claim to a particularly French interest in Judith at this time and what might underpin it.

Where Llewellyn is strongest is in her careful interpretation of the individual texts. She argues that in Le Mystère de Judith et Holofernés, probably authored by Jean de Molinet around the turn of the sixteenth century, Judith’s actions are presented as a performance, enacted on the stage of the enemy camp, in which she is an agent of God. In such a way, she does not subvert patriarchy so much as demonstrate obedience to God’s will. Llewellyn then explores the poem La Judit by Huguenot poet Guillaume Salluste Du Bartas (published 1574), apparently commissioned by Jeanne de Navarre. Drawing upon contemporary theories of sight, she argues that Du Bartas privileges the spectacle of Judith’s beauty and attire, and her invisibility at other key moments. In keeping with Calvinist views and perhaps with female readers in mind, this Judith must borrow her jewels and fine clothes, her beauty is deeply problematic (hinted even through choices of rhyme and rhythm) and she is absent in scenes of feasting and drinking.

Curiously, the fact that the Book of Judith was removed from Protestant Bibles by Du Bartas’s time is not mentioned until the following chapter, in which Llewellyn examines the Imitation de la victoire de Judich by Catholic poet, Gabrielle de Coignard (published posthumously in 1594). Coignard invokes varied notions of community – urban and feminine – within her text while also inserting herself into a group of strong, widowed women in history. Llewellyn interprets parallels between Bethulia and Coignard’s Toulouse attacked by Huguenot forces during the wars, and the strong female partnership between Judith and her maidservant Abra. By comparison to the sexually alluring Judiths of male authors, Coignard’s is noticeably chaste and humble.

Pierre Heyns, an Antwerp schoolmaster whose play was intended for a juvenile female audience, creates an exemplar. Framing allegorical characters provide commentary to help impressionable viewers to emphasise the heroine’s virtues and Judith is distanced from her more reprehensible acts. Llewellyn argues that Heyns’s choice of this murderous heroine had a powerful didactic purpose: Judith, and the lessons Heyns hoped to convey, were likely to be unforgettable. Finally, Llewellyn examines sermons published across the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Here, she observes, the story of Judith is rarely evoked in its entirety. Only isolated virtues – her fervour, austerity, desire for solitude – are praiseworthy, and this compartmentalisation reflected how problematic Judith’s actions had become as a whole for Counter-Reformation Catholicism.

Interestingly, Llewellyn concludes that Judith was anything but silent in the hands of these authors – indeed, they all wanted to speak for her in their own ways. I am less sure, however, about Llewellyn’s conclusion that scope for ‘early modern woman was perhaps less limited than many have suggested’ (p. 135) on the strength of this evidence. One could perhaps argue just...