Lettering the Self in Medieval and Early Modern France (review)

This volume explores the ways in which five sets of celebrated letter writers manipulate the accepted rules of the ars dictaminis in order to achieve specific agendas: Baudri of Bourgueil and Constance of Angers; Abelard and Héloise; Christine de Pizan; Marguerite de Navarre and Guillaume Briçonnet; and Étienne de la Boétie and Michel de Montaigne. The five chapters are preceded by a to-the-point Introduction outlining the importance of ars dictaminis in the Middle Ages and early modern periods. The texts analysed are in Latin and French, both verse and prose, and date from between the eleventh and sixteenth centuries. In all but the last chapter, the exchange is between a male teacher figure and a woman. Abbot Baudri of Bourgueil’s extolling of the beauty and erudition of Constance of Angers is characterized by ambiguous playfulness, while Constance’s responses exploit the conventions of letter writing to resist the direction of the exchange. These Latin verse epistles show the two correspondents taking on the simultaneous and contradictory roles of abbot and nun, of teacher and pupil, of separated lovers, of friends, all shaped by the rhetorical demands of their medium of communication, yet resisting the boundaries imposed by literary convention. These roles also appear in the correspondence between Abelard and Héloise, although in this case the two figures are not merely play-acting: they were indeed lovers and had been married before entering religion, and the tension between Héloise’s feelings as desiring wife and dutiful abbess informs these Latin prose texts. Her attempt to attain inner conversion by performing confession and obedience in her letters is perceptively analysed by Katherine Kong, who relates the representation of feelings in this epistolary exchange to other texts written by one or other of the couple or attributed to them, in particular the Historia calamitatum, the Problemata Heloissae, and the Epistolae duorum amantium. With Christine de Pizan, we are introduced to a very different situation, in that we have a successful woman writer and publisher struggling for recognition in a masculine, frequently misogynistic, clerical culture. Christine expresses herself in the vernacular, whereas her addressees typically write to each other in Latin, highlighting her outsider status. A century later, undercurrents of authority and power also colour the correspondence between Marguerite of Navarre and her spiritual director Guillaume Briçonnet: the structures within which she articulates her spiritual quest are shown to shape her entire writing career. Finally, the epistolary friendship between Étienne de la Boétie and Montaigne can be seen to be based on a shared misogyny. In a striking enactment of the function of the letter in providing presence in absence, Montaigne later instigates a quasi-correspondence with his deceased friend and mentor by editing his work. Overall, this is a valuable study of letter writing in the premodern period. The argument is founded on often masterly close textual analysis enriched with relevant examples of fictional letter writing, turning what could have been a rather dry tome into a lively and approachable discussion that should appeal to a wide readership.