Thirty years ago, when Joan Kelly asked: “Did women have a renaissance?” – her answer was “no”. Today, researchers of early European history are unlikely to give such an unambiguous answer. Nevertheless, more female voices of the past are beginning to sound louder. I spoke with Dr Elizabeth L’Estrange, lecturer in History of Art and the head of the AHCVS Department, whose upcoming book Anne De Graville and Women’s Literary Networks in Early Modern France brings us closer to answering “yes” to Joan Kelly’s question.
In a few sentences, what is your new book about?
My new book is about Anne de Graville, a noblewoman living in France in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century. She wrote two literary works that she presented to royal women and collected quite an important library. The book looks at the relationship between her library and the works she wrote and how she was interested in promoting the cause of women at her time. It was a very long research and writing process that took me down a lot of different paths and rabbit holes. It was a really interesting project because it took me from art history to literature, book history, manuscript studies, and gender studies. And now all these things have finally come together, it’s nice to feel that I have brought one female voice from the past to light.
In your article Un étrange moyen de séduction you describe one book from her library which was highly personalised. Can we only trace such artefacts, or are there other methods to determine that a particular book was in Anne’s collection?
That book is easy to put in her library because, as you’ve said, it’s so personalised. It has a portrait of her at the beginning, her coat of arms, and a dedication to her. Quite a few books have tentative possibilities for being part of her library because they belonged to her father or mother. There are other books that are less personalised but still have some indication of her ownership – in some books, she wrote her name inside them, the date she bought them, or the date she inherited them. And there are some books that we can retrospectively put into her library because they have bindings from her daughter’s library.
A good part of your book is dedicated to ‘la querelle des femmes’. What were the main lines of thought in this debate, and what stance did Anne take?
The ‘querelle des femmes’ was a literary debate that began in the early fifteenth century in France. It was a debate in which men were pitted against women in terms of the roles that men and women should play in society. And the biggest voice in the women’s camp was Christine de Pizan. She was basically fed up with how women were portrayed in literature, with misogynistic, satirical, and rude depictions of women in popular books that had a wide readership. She thought women were not really like this and that this attitude towards them was leading to a more general exclusion of women from society. People in the other camp, male commentators, thought that Christine was wrong, that women had specific roles in society and were less able to take on different roles (such as teachers or rulers) because of what was said in the bible and because of how medical discourses constructed the female sex. So the ‘querelle’ was about people putting forward a case for women to be better respected within society. Christine de Pizan rewrote many works in a way that gave them a pro-feminine spin. And I think that Anne de Graville was reading Christine’s work and was aware of these debates about how women have been marginalised in society. So she deliberately portrayed strong, positive, heroines in her own works.
You’ve partially answered my next question – how Anne changed the poem La Belle Dame Sans Mercy originally written by Alain Chartier, which she rewrote for Claude of France. So she made it more pro-feminine?
Yes…actually you’ve said that she wrote the Belle Dame for Claude of France, but I found out while I was doing the research that she didn’t actually write it for Claude of France but for Louise of Savoy, Claude’s mother-in-law…. Everyone previously assumed that she wrote two works for the queen, but I found a missing miniature that shows her presenting the work to Louise. That was a big bingo moment in the research! So Alain Chartier wrote his poem in 1424 and got into a bit of trouble over it because in the story, which is a debate poem, the lady consistently refuses to give into the amorous demands of the lover. He goes off, and eventually, according to the narrative, he dies. And Chartier got into a lot of trouble because people thought he’d written a woman who was too uncourtly and cruel, that she should really have given in to his requests. And what Anne de Graville does, in her version, is she chops off the beginning and the end of the text, so we don’t have the framing from the narrator, and she dives straight into the debate between the man and the woman. She also uses a different poetic form, so she expands the number of lines of poetry each voice has, giving her more room to develop the debate. She employs certain tactics, like making the lover look completely ridiculous by the way he repeats certain phrases and certain words, and she strengthens the position of the woman through various poetic strategies. So she is using Chartier’s work, directly quotes from him, and uses his words and poetic structures, but she expands in a way that gives more authority and presence to the female voice and makes the male character look like a rather love-sick fool. And it is very ambiguous in her text whether he dies in the end or not.
As for her second major work, Le Beau Roman, the Encyclopaedia of Women in the Renaissance credits two women for translating Boccaccio’s Teseida into French – Anne de Graville and Jeanne de La Font. Why did they both do the same thing or were their literary aims different?
The annoying thing is that Jeanne de la Font’s version has been lost. So we don’t know what her version looked like. We don’t know whether she translated it directly from Boccaccio’s Italian version or whether, like Anne de Graville, she translated it from the French prose version. But it’s possible that they both chose this text because it was already popular in France, a story that was being discussed at court or read amongst the courtly audience. It’s a text in which a woman is essentially being fought over by two men who want to marry her, and the woman in the original text and in the prose version is, in a sense, voiceless. The interesting thing is that Jeanne de la Font was the wife of Jacques Thiboust, who was also in the circle of Anne de Graville and Margaret of Navarre, and Jacques Thiboust also read the Belle Dame Sans Mercy. So, he had a copy of Chartier’s poetry. Hence, it is possible that Jeanne de la Font was reading similar kinds of work as Anne de Graville, so perhaps, like Anne, she thought that women were poorly represented in literature. If we could find Jeanne de la Font’s version, it would be of great interest to many people, but unfortunately, it seems lost.
In your first book, Holy Motherhood, you discussed the importance of images of motherhood in Books of Hours for aristocratic women of that time. What role did such books play in Anne’s library?
The easy answer is there were no Books of Hours in Anne’s collection that I’ve been able to find, which raises all sorts of other questions as to why that is the case. Is it because they’ve been lost? Is it because we just don’t know which Books of Hours she owned because many such books out there have no indication of ownership? There is a Book of Hours known to have belonged to her father that could have passed to Anne or her husband but it’s not certain. Also, is it because of the fact that she was associated closely with the reform movement? She was interested in evangelical reform, a drive to reform the church in the period just before the Reformation actually occurred in Germany. And in general, there are very few religious books in the library that I’ve been able to reconstruct, which is in stark contrast to many other libraries owned by women in this period or just before. We could think that perhaps she is not that interested in religion or that those books somehow got removed from her library and passed on to somebody else, and we don’t have a trace of them. I don’t think she was a radical reformer, but she was certainly in the circle of people who were very interested in religious reform, like Margaret of Navarre and Claude of France. Does this mean that she wouldn’t have wanted a Book of Hours – I don’t know, but it’s kind of interesting that there isn’t one definitely linked to her.
Then what kind of books were most abundant in her library?
She owned quite a lot of texts that are known as ‘chansons de geste’, which are epic tales of the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries, works that relate to the Alexander Cycle and pre-date chivalric literature. She also had quite a lot of manuscripts that were very old, dating from the twelfth, thirteenth or fourteenth centuries suggesting she was interested in older French literature. She also had quite a lot of texts that relate to her family’s history, texts of Norman origin (her family were from Normandy) and texts that hint at or explicitly relate to the role of her ancestors; some of these books she inherited from her father and relate to de Graville family in the fourteenth and fifteenth century, the roles they played at the French court, their relationships to the previous kings of France. So it seems that Anne was keen to cultivate family history through some of the books that she owned. She also commissioned works with links to Normandy or which were painted by Norman artists. And then she had several works that link to the ‘querelle des femmes’. She does not own the most obvious ‘querelle’ works, such as Christine de Pizan’s City of Ladies, but she does own two copies of Christine’s Le Livre de la Mutacion de Fortune and other works with interesting or problematic female characters, like the Sept Sages de Rome, which has got a kind of wicked stepmother character who raises problems about women’s roles within families. She owned a very luxurious copy of the Petit Jehan de Saintré which is a topsy-turvy chivalric story in which the woman character is manipulating a knightly figure, making him do things that he shouldn’t be doing, thus turning traditional men-woman relations upside down. So she definitely had texts that show that she is interested in how women are portrayed in literature and how this can be problematic in some way.
To conclude, what are your plans for the future?
Actually, I am currently doing an edition of Anne’s two surviving works with a colleague in the States. We are transcribing from the existing manuscripts the two works that she wrote, Le Beau Roman and La Belle Dame Sans Mercy. And we are going to provide the first modern critical edition of the French text with an English translation. Hopefully, this means that Anne’s works will be more visible and more available not just to scholars in niche areas but also to people who want to teach this kind of stuff in the classrooms. Christine de Pizan is now taught quite regularly in classes on mediaeval literature, French literature and gender studies. We hope that by making Anne’s works available, we can also add her voice to these areas. And I also keep a look out for other possible works by Anne de Graville. When I go looking in related manuscripts, I always wonder whether this anonymous poem or verse is written by Anne de Graville – though that’s a slightly vaguer aim, perhaps!