Hélisenne de Crenne (c. 1500-c. 1552)

25 Hélisenne de Crenne (c. 1500-c. 1552) Diane S. Wood Texas Tech University Hélisenne rereads and especially rewrites in order to erase ... the lines between male and female in order to negate sexual difference and discrimination. She reverses gender roles and overturns acts and accomplishments and qualities normally reserved for heroes by substituting in her portrayals of past and present public culture heroines for these heroes. (Nash, "Exerçant" 41) Hélisenne de Crenne's literary fortune has never been brighter. Once an author whose famous best-selling novel was subjected to the indignity of being emended, shortened by two thirds, and republished as part of the "Bibliothèque introuvable," she has been rediscovered in the last decades of the twentieth century. Her writing is now the object of international scrutiny in new scholarly editions, doctoral dissertations, a growing number of articles, and, most recently, a full-length book. She has established a place in French literary history as the innovative woman author who produced France's first sentimental novel and the forerunner of the epistolary novel as well as the woman writer with the most substantial printed corpus until the advent of Marguerite de Navarre (Reynier 101-2; Beaulieu and Desrosiers-Bonin 1 155). Les Angoysses douloureuses qui procèdent d'amour appeared in Paris in 1538, published by Denis Janot who targeted readers of fiction in the vernacular by printing small handsized volumes illustrated with woodcuts in the new style roman type. Perhaps foreseeing a lucrative publishing success, Janot had 37 woodcuts created especially for this work which he protected with a two-year privilège (Rawles #263). The volume was an instant success, sparking the publication of a pirated Lyonnaise edition, also with woodcuts, albeit inferior ones (Wood, Hélisenne 52). Her three other volumes followed from Janot's presses in rapid succession: Les Epistres familières et invectives (1539), Le Songe (1540), and Les Quatre Premiers Livres des Eneydes (1541). The first three works were published together in a single volume in 1 543 under the title Les Œuvres de ma dame Hélisenne. The title page attests that Hélisenne had a hand in this compilation of the three works "qu'elle a puis nagueres recogneues & mises en leur entier" and that she ordered their publication, "imprimées nouvellement par le commandement de ladicte Dame" (Buzon 60). The combined works were printed in a single volume four times with the final sixteenth-century edition appearing in 1560, at the onset ofFrance's bloody civil wars. In all, there were eight editions of the Angoysses in the sixteenth century. The last three were edited by Claude Colet, who attempted to "translate" them 26FRENCH AND FRANCOPHONE WOMEN into a style which was less latinate and hence more comprehensive to their lectrices. Despite its success in the French Renaissance, Les Angoysses did not reappear until Harry R. Secor edited the entire novel as his 1957 doctoral dissertation. While the Secor edition was not widely circulated, two simultaneous editions of Part One of the novel by Paule Demats and Jérôme Vercraysse were published in 1968. These partial editions became available as a new generation of feminist scholars challenged the literary canon and sought authentic female voices from the past. Despite the lack of complete editions, several doctoral dissertations devoted to Hélisenne de Crenne appeared by 1980, a witness to a growing interest which was frustrated by the lack of readily available scholarly editions of Hélisenne's complete corpus. A poor quality Slatkine reprint published in 1977 did present the full texts of the Angoysses, Epistres, and Songe but its presentation did not encourage readers and it reproduced the emended Colet text of 1560. The Epistres began to receive the attention of critics and an English translation by Marianna M. Mustacchi and Paul J. Archambault appeared in 1986, followed by a critical edition by JeanPhilippe Beaulieu and Hannah Fournier in 1995, and a second critical edition by Jerry C. Nash in 1996. An English translation of the novel by Lisa Neal and Steven Rendall was published in 1996. Christine de Buzon's edition of the complete novel, including Janot's woodcuts, came out the...