“Un honneste passetems”: Strategies of Legitimation in French Renaissance Women’s Prefaces

“Un honneste passetems”: Strategies of Legitimation in French Renaissance Women’s Prefaces Anne R. Larsen I N THE INTRODUCTION to her translation of Jacques Derrida’s Dissemination, Barbara Johnson states that the preface as genre is “ a metalinguistic moment of self-reflection.. . . Situated both inside and outside, both before and after the ‘book’ whose ‘book-ness’ it promotes and transgresses, the preface has always inscribed itself in a strange warp of time and space.” 1This study explores, in the form of an overview, the self-reflection occurring in prefaces of publications by several French Renaissance women writers. How do these writers reveal, by means of the preface, the circumstances of their writing? What prefatory strategies do they use in their deployment of the classical exordial tradition? And, in what way does their use of the preface differ from that of contempo­ rary male writers? I. The Preface as Genre In order to respond to these questions, it is crucial to understand the functions of the preface as a codified genre. The preface forms an in­ tegral part of the printed book; hence the need to examine, as well, the motives early literary women had for moving from manuscript circula­ tion to print. Barbara Johnson mentions three aspects of a preface. It is both inside and outside the book; it promotes the book; and it transgresses the book. Gérard Genette calls the preface a “ paratexte,” and a “ vestibule qui offre à chacun la possibilité d’entrer, ou de rebrousser chemin.” 2 The Renaissance preface takes on multiple forms external to the text such as the dedicatory letter, the address to the reader, the foreword or “ avertissement,” and the elogia commending the book to the reader. The prologue, unlike other prefatory manifestations, is normally part of the text. Second, the preface promotes the book. As a “ discours” in Benveniste ’s sense of the term, the preface includes a first-person commen­ tary often mentioning the type of reader for which the work is destined, VOL. XXX, No. 4 11 L ’E sprit C réateur and the circumstances or genesis of the work. The preface thus frequent­ ly contains an authorial “ déclaration d’intention” that instructs the reader on how to read the text (Seuils, p. 205). In the Renaissance, this declaration is at once didactic in its directives and polemical in its defense against possible criticism. Its primary aim is to negotiate a place for the work, and its author, in the public realm. It seeks above all to solicit the reader’s goodwill through the rhetorical device of captatio benevolentiae with its standard exordial topoi. During the early modern period, the space devoted to this device necessarily varied in direct proportion to the fame of the writer. The less established the writer, the greater the use of exordial topoi, and whatever other means would give the poet recog­ nition in a market economy. Philippe Desan indicates, for instance, that Ronsard’s early verse reads more as requests for employment springing from a strong need to impose himself on the market than as a disinter­ ested dialogue with the Muses.3 Renaissance literary women had, by necessity, motives other than economic advancement or social mobility.4 As members of the aristocracy and upper gentry, they did not live by their pen. But they also used extensively the “ discours d’escorte” for reasons that we shall see. Third, Hegel first stated the transgressive nature of the preface by pronouncing it “ perverse,” both chronologically and programmatically. As François Rigolot sums it up, the preface is written after the text whose future it seeks to define, and it proposes a reading that the plurality of meanings in the text is bound to undo. The preface as “ perverse” dis­ course can also be stated otherwise: as a marginalized pre-text, it is said to inscribe the feminine. Deconstructive theory has highlighted the rela­ tion of “woman,” as imaginary rather than biological construct, to mar­ ginal areas of texts such as prefaces, endnotes, or afterwords, areas that are disregarded or taken for granted.5Additionally, since the preface is frequently coded as epistle in the Renaissance, it epitomizes textually the relational existence that current theory...