Gender, Rhetoric and Print Culture in French Renaissance Writing by Floyd Gray (review)

Book Reviews1 1 3 Reviews Pre-Revolutionary France Floyd Gray. Gender, Rhetoric and Print Culture in French Renaissance Writing. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000. ISBN: 052177327X. Pp. 227. $59.95. A legitimate reading of any Renaissance text requires an awareness of both the rhetorical conventions at play in it and the printer's role in its creation . Too often, observes Floyd Gray in his latest book, scholars approach Renaissance literature from modern perspectives, producing anachronistic misinterpretations. Likewise, they fail to recognize how market considerations of the nascent print industry affected not only the dissemination of new works, but what got published and even written. Gray pulls these themes together elegantly, as he reads French Renaissance writing on gender through the twin lenses of rhetoric and print culture. Gray targets a fairly disparate set of"marginalizing discourses:" misogynist , feminist, autobiographical, homosexual, and medical. Moving mostly chronologically through the French Renaissance literary canon, he examines these discourses in texts ofthe Querelle des Femmes and by François Rabelais, Jeanne Flore (misprinted on the dust jacket as Jean Flore), Marguerite de Navarre, the so-called Rhétoriqueurs, Clément Marot, Pernette du Guillet, Louise Labe, Michel de Montaigne, Marie de Gournay, and Pierre de Bourdeille, Sieur de Brantôme. With the possible exception of the last chapter, which examines homosexual discourse in Montaigne and Brantôme and early pornography , this eclectic set of writers and themes works reasonably well. Attention to parody and irony leads Gray to discount some feminist readings of texts by women and to reject some charges of misogyny leveled at men. The Querelle des Femmes, for example, which he calls the first promotional event ofthe printing age, reveals more about readers' desire for controversy than about writers' own prejudices. Rabelais, he says, takes neither a feminist nor antifeminist stance in the Tiers Livre, but parodies the clichés of the Querelle. The Comptes amoureux, attributed to Jeanne Flore but, according to Gray, more likely the product of a male author or authors, should be read as ironic rather than as a sincere expression of female desire. Feminist readings of Marguerite de Navarre's Heptaméron miss the point that the debate framing each story is more important than any single interpretation. Guillet writes in a feminine voice, but her poems are not all "about" gender, and what matters for Labé is poetry, not politics. Like Rabelais, Montaigne is neither feminist nor anti-feminist; he explores a range of opinions and even identifies similarities between men and women. Gray also describes how print culture changed how people wrote and read. Despite oral traditions represented in it, he says, the Heptaméron could only have been a printed text, as it calls upon its audience to read and reread in search of meaning. Print linked theye ofthe text more closely to the text's ] 1 4 Women in French Studies author, he says, and he explores the gendering of the je in works by Marot, Guillet, and Labé. The quintessentialje ofthe French Renaissance, Montaigne wrote specifically to a print public, says Gray. By the late sixteenth century, audiences read more quickly and read more; Montaigne forced them to slow down. Marie de Gournay, whom Gray calls a savvy self-promoter and perhaps the only professional woman writer in Renaissance France, exploited the needs of a new print public to make a career for herself as an editor and writer. Most significantly for Gray, it seems, the print industry offered up controversial works in the vernacular for consumption by a general reading public . If Montaigne wrote of spontaneous sex change, cross-dressing, hermaphroditism , and androgyny to illustrate human difference, Brantôme mined these same themes for their sensational appeal. As with the Querelle des Femmes a century earlier, these topics had high commercial value, and, Gray adds, works on sexuality soon acquired a pornographic bent. He offers no criteria for defining pornography. Despite his identification ofMarie de Gournay as the only professional woman writer in Renaissance France, Gray concludes that what was marginal in the French Renaissance was not women or women writers, but homosexual discourse. Although he goes too far in his dismissal of modern feminist interpretations , Gray provides valuable...