The Queen's Library: Image-Making at the Court of Anne of Brittany, 1477-1514

Chapter Three. Women Famous and Infamous: Court Controversies About Female Virtues

c h a p t e r t h r e e Women Famous and Infamous: Court Controversies About Female Virtues This chapter focuses on another form of literary reconstruction, namely the “famous-women” topos, whose wide popularity in fifteenth- and sixteenthcentury Europe was generated to a large degree by the biographies in Boccaccio ’s De mulieribus claris. Translated into French in the early fifteenth century, Boccaccio’s work also inspired imitations, such as Christine de Pizan ’s Cité des Dames (1404–5).1 In the late fifteenth century, Louise of Savoy and her husband commissioned a manuscript version of one of the earlier French translations of Boccaccio’s work (BnF ffr. 599). The first known edition of a French translation of Boccaccio’s work (Paris: Antoine Vérard, 1493) was dedicated to Anne of Brittany. The French queen also commissioned an elaborately decorated manuscript book on this subject, Antoine Dufour’s Vies des femmes célèbres (1504–6), which contains some ninety verbal and visual vignettes of classical, historical, and contemporary women of note, including Joan of Arc. Around the same period (1503) Symphorien Champier’s Nef des dames vertueuses, dedicated to Anne of France, appeared in print. The writings of other court poets, such as Jean Marot and Jean Lemaire de Belges, were likewise strewn with references to famous and infamous women.2 Ambiguities surrounding male and female definitions of famous women as well as authors’ and illuminators’ reconstruction of them emerge through an examination of this corpus of writings. They offer insight into conceptions about women in late medieval and early Renaissance Europe and the manner in which the intended portrayal of females of rank by authorized male voices 109 Women Famous and Infamous might have underpinned—or contested—contemporary realities. Indeed, inherent contradictions that surface in these works between the ostensible glorification of women and the literary and artistic means adopted toward that end suggest the existence of underlying tensions in male creations of works for and about women.3 Boccaccio’s De mulieribus claris: Textual and Pictorial Ambiguities It is not surprising that the savvy Parisian bookseller-publisher Antoine Vérard chose to exploit the popular—and sometimes provocative—theme of famous women with his 1493 publication of an anonymous French translation of Giovanni Boccaccio’s De mulieribus claris, one of the most celebrated works of the late medieval period.4 Written for the most part in 1361–62,5 Boccaccio’s collection of 106 biographies of famous women from the classical , biblical, and medieval worlds was the first recueil in Western literature devoted to women alone.6 But his catalogue of women offers an ambiguous assessment of females, at least to some modern readers, because, despite the many women he praises, Boccaccio essentially considers them to be inferior to men, due to their propensity to be unfaithful, lascivious, suspicious, avaricious , and stubborn. Some critics believe that Boccaccio’s pervasive criticism of women nullifies their praiseworthy comportment and offers an ambiguous perspective vis-à-vis women.7 Such an outlook reminds modern scholars of typical medieval male attitudes toward the opposite sex inherited from antiquity and Christian teachings.8 Kolsky suggests, however, that the work’s “extremely ambiguous” nature set the stage for a variety of future adaptations: By its ambiguities, Boccaccio’s work constituted an extremely powerful, flexible and amenable model . . . [that] could be appropriated to vastly differing points of view; it could be shrewdly adapted to address diverse readerships, and to attend to changing social and political contexts. (4) Indeed, several critics point out that in his De mulieribus claris Boccaccio actually presented women as greater intellectual and moral powers than most of his contemporaries or sources,9 that his use of their stories as moral narratives authorized the presence of these unorthodox women in the visual 110 chapter three arts, and that the work anticipated the Renaissance endorsement of the active participation of gifted women in art, literature, and public life.10 Franklin’s claim that “there is little doubt about Famous Women, either the text itself or its reception among those for whom it was written, to suggest that it would have been experienced as ambiguous or contradictory” (13) is tempered by Buettner, who straddles both camps by recognizing Boccaccio’s ambivalence toward women and support of the female cause (18). Glenda McLeod (6–7) also sees both the innovative and conventional...