Rymes (1545), and: Rymes (review)

Pernette du Guillet's poetic collection Rymes has been frequently republished and reedited since its original appearance in Lyons in 1545. Three editions in the sixteenth century were followed in the nineteenth and the twentieth by seven critical editions. The two most recent build on their predecessors but with a significant difference: their introductory analyses benefit from now almost four decades of intensive textual, source, historical, and feminist-oriented studies on Du Guillet. The Droz edition contains the most extensive introductory analysis, while the Champion edition complements the former with its listing of the variants among the three sixteenth-century editions.

The introductions to both volumes can and should be read in tandem since they have different emphases. Elise Rajchenbach begins by addressing the lack of archival documentation on Du Guillet and speculates that her name may be a nom de plume, attributed to her by her editor Antoine du Moulin or publisher Jean de Tournes, and designating the name of a land. This was not an unusual practice; the contemporary writer Marguerite Briet adopted the pseudonym Hélisenne de Crenne based on the name of her husband's property, and Madeleine and Catherine des Roches preferred to be known by the name of their acquired land. Rajchenbach counters the notion that Du Guillet's verse is a literary hoax, as suggested by Mireille Huchon in her Louise Labé: Une créature de papier (2006), stating that Huchon has offered no "indubitable proofs" to support such a thesis.

Rajchenbach situates Du Guillet in her Lyonnais context, especially in connection with the phenomenon of the woman writer from the 1530s to the 1550s. She discusses the significance of Jean de Tournes's publication of the Rymes and Petrarch's canzoniere in August 1545 under the watchful eye of Maurice Scève. Du Guillet's posthumous Rymes, like Petrarch's verse to Laura, was a memorialized literary tombeau. Rajchenbach reformulates the fairly standard interpretation of Du Guillet's verse as a paean to the glory of Scève whose auctoritas the latter invoked to legitimize her writing. She notes, however, that Du Guillet's verse should be construed not as a servile imitation but as an aesthetic and thematic deviation from the Petrarchan and Scevian approaches, particularly to the figure of the beloved.

Following P. Galand-Hallyn, Rajchenbach finds in the Rymes an aesthetic of the fragmentary and the episodic akin to that in Statius's Silvae and unlike the controlled format of the Scevian model. Following other critics, notably Ann R. Jones and Colette Winn, she discusses Du Guillet's resistance to the Petrarchan and Marotic poetics of carnal consummation, and shows how Du Guillet infused the then-current Neoplatonic notion of parfaite amitié with an erotics of knowledge, of a new voeir and a new sçavoir. It is here that Rajchenbach sees Du Guillet's most important contributions: the Lyonnais poet refused the role of the Dame sans mercy, thus creating for herself a poetic space in which she could express a new voice; Du Guillet also daringly experimented with form and rhyme.

Christian Barateau and Danielle Trudeau, for their part, underscore two aspects of Du Guillet's verse: the response tradition and the musical setting of several of Du Guillet's epigrams. They emphasize the involvement of Du Guillet in Lyons' cultural networks and supportive intellectual alliances with humanists and promoters such as Scève and Jean de Vauzelles. The editors discuss the development of Du Guillet's poetic voice as she explored the modalities offered her. She found a creative commonality for instance with the heroine of Héroët's Parfaicte Amye (1542) who rejects the erotic pursuit of the male lover. Du Guillet turned to the courtly...