Louise Labe: Feminist and Poet of the Renaissance. by Louise Labe; Keith CameronReview by: Deborah Lesko BakerThe Sixteenth Century Journal, Vol. 23, No. 1 (Spring, 1992), pp. 180-182Published by: The Sixteenth Century JournalStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2542101 .

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180 The Sixteenth Century Journal XXIII/1 (1992)

of the two schools-smaller, usually later in attaining each stage of development, less successful in placing graduates in high secular and ecclesiastical offices, and

lacking in the intellectual creativity which made Oxford logic and natural philoso- phy influential throughout medieval Europe. The book provides a valuable survey of medieval university education as presented at Cambridge, with considerable detail on texts used, methods of teaching, and requirements for degrees. Cambridge attracted many foundations of new colleges from the mid-fifteenth century onward. Under the Tudors, who favored it strongly, it began catching up to Oxford in size, wealth, and eventually even the placement of its graduates. From the late fifteenth

century, this improving fortune was linked to the introduction of humanistic culture, which found a home in several Cambridge colleges. The decisive figure here was the adviser to Lady Margaret Beaufort, John Fisher, who was also bishop of Rochester and friend and patron of Erasmus. Leader traces the developments which aided humanism's rise, such as the growth of teaching within the colleges and the

appearance of salaried lecturers. He also demonstrates that a deeply religious motivation underlay the curricular reforms associated with Fisher. While he makes it clear that there was no inevitable conflict between humanist studies and the traditional scholastic curriculum, he also chronicles the gradual transformation of the arts curriculum from one dominated by logic and natural philosophy to one dominated by literary study and moral philosophy. Though many elements of the old curriculum survived, Cambridge underwent this transformation far more

rapidly and smoothly than Oxford. The author sees a genuinely Catholic reforma- tion under way in the opening decades of the sixteenth century, one that sought to

regenerate both intellectual and spiritual life peacefully and gradually. Rather

wistfully, however, he concludes the volume by showing that this benign outcome did not prevail. The growth of Protestant belief among young humanists and the political and dynastic imperatives of Henry VIII pushed the nation and its univer- sities into more rapid and more disruptive change. In the end, humanism survived and became even more dominant than ever. And Cambridge also survived, contin- ued to grow, and clearly seized the intellectual primacy from Oxford. But the price paid was the loss of religious unity and a marked increase in governmental intervention in the affairs of the university.

Charles G. Nauert, Jr. ................. University of Missouri-Columbia

Louise Labe: Feminist and Poet of the Renaissance. Keith Cameron.

Berg Women's Series. New York: Berg Publishers, 1990. 100 pp. $29.95.

In the prefatory note to his recent monograph, Keith Cameron states that the goal of his text is "to introduce the general, non-specialized reader to the work, character, and epoch" of the sixteenth-century Lyonnais poet Louise Labe. With this remark, Cameron identifies his audience appropriately: this book serves as a helpful guide for those unfamiliar with Labe's literary and personal legacy to the French Renaissance.

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Book Reviews 181

The first three chapters provide elements of the cultural, biographical, and

literary backgrounds from which Labe's writings emerge. Beginning with a por- trait of Lyon during the first half of the sixteenth century, Cameron traces the city's development into a significant urban complex which featured an active salon life and a burgeoning interest in Renaissance humanism, arts, and letters. Stimulated by the

growth of Lyon's printing industry, its proximity to Italy, and its frequent visits by the royal court, this interest in letters became identified in particular with a key resurgence of French verse by poets such as Labe, Maurice Sceve, and Pernette du Guillet. In moving his focus to Labe herself, Cameron takes up an angle perennially argued by critics: the rapport between Labe's outspoken and sometimes overtly sexual writings and her unconventional, perhaps provocative life as a woman in

Lyonnais society. Here and throughout the rest of the book, the author works toward balancing a double response to this type of biographically-based interpreta- tion. On one hand he stresses, with considerable documentation, that the legendary innuendos surrounding Labe's life have been built upon "meager facts" and upholds the crucial importance of separating the poet's lived existence from her artistic

persona. At the same time, he himself occasionally speculates on links between Labe's life and works and uses those links to inject his own explanations for her received personal reputation.

In his chapter on Labe's literary backgrounds, Cameron uses the widely-varied poems written by Labe's contemporaries in her honor and appended to her 1555 Oeuvres as a point of departure to review the classical, Italian, and native French traditions which informed her writing. This segment provides an introduction to Petrarch and to the conventions and conceits from the Canzoniere which were taken

up by all the major sixteenth-century French poets. The Neoplatonic movement is then discussed in the context of Ficino's original contributions and the debates on the nature of women and love that formed the ongoing Querelle desfemmes. The author concludes his section on literary backgrounds with a brief presentation of Labe's Lyonnais compatriot Maurice Sceve, emphasizing not only Sceve's masterful

incorporation of both Petrarchan and Neoplatonic ideas, but his influential role in the same period and milieu in which Louise Labe's own literary career developed.

Cameron examines Labe's literary career in three chapters, in which he pro- vides a clear, systematic overview of her complete Oeuvres of 1555. In the first of these chapters, he combines an examination of Labe's three elegies and her prefatory letter to the Lyonnais noblewoman Clemence de Bourges, demonstrating how both texts contribute to Labe's important position as Renaissance feminist. Labe's

espousal of sexual equality in the preface is explored in the light of her defense of feminine writing as an arm to combat the oppression of women in all domains of

society. The originality of the elegies is seen in their parallel "politicisation of the woman's plight" (44), which here takes the form of a series of exhortations by Labe to her female readers to accept love, rather than to repress or fear it, and to assert their right to their full natural feelings in male-female relationships.

The two chapters that follow develop Labe's views on love in her prose dialogue Le debat de Folie et dAmour and in her sequence of twenty-four sonnets. Cameron frames these two works usefully by contrasting the more detached prose theory of the nature of love in Le debat to the engaged personal experience of a woman in love in the sonnets. His discussion of Le debat is lucid and concise: he first introduces the "courtroom" dispute between masculine Amour and feminine Folie before Jupiter

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182 The Sixteenth Century Journal XXIII/1 (1992)

as a more oblique form of Rabelaisian satire and then reviews the plot and principal ideas of each of the dialogue's five parts. Using references to an insightful article by Anne Larson, Cameron summarizes the importance of Le debat to Labe's ethos of sexual equality by relating Jupiter's final judgement that Love and Folly go hand in hand to the idea of shared, reciprocal roles of men and women in the love

relationship. He also makes interesting links between the notions of love and folly in Labe's dialogue and in Marguerite de Navarre's Heptameron and Montaigne's "Sur les vers de Virgile."

Cameron's treatment of the sonnets entails a brief, sequential commentary of each of the twenty-four poems. In these commentaries he identifies the main themes, emotions, and Petrarchan/Neoplatonic conventions that animate Labe's verse and stresses the important general point that Labe's originality lies in part in her female poetic speaker's adaptation of feelings and modes of discourse tradi-

tionally assumed by male poets. Although I have difficulty seeing the coherence of some of the thematic groupings of consecutive poems through which Cameron

organizes his discussion, the overall chronological journey through the sonnets is useful in providing a look at the range of Labe's poetic strategies.

Given the recent revival and growing attention being shown to the contribu- tions of female authors across the stage of the European Renaissance, Cameron's book will help serve a need for studies which furnish introductory access to

significant individual women authors for a widening academic audience.

Deborah Lesko Baker ........................... Georgetown University

Sermons on Jeremiah by Jean Calvin and Sermons on Micah by Jean Calvin, Blair Reynolds, translator. Texts and Studies in Religion, vols. 46 & 47 (Lewiston/Queenston/Lampeter: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1990), 299 and 449 pp. $69.95 and $79.95, respectively.

The two volumes of sermons which appear here in partial English translation are volumes five and six of the Supplementa Calviniana, Sermons inedites. These Supplementa volumes are part of a project begun by Hans Rickert of Tibingen in the 1930s, then revived after World War II by the World Presbyterian Alliance, to publish the remaining Ms. sermons of Calvin. The sermons on Micah, volume 5 of the Supplementa, were edited by Jean-Daniel Benoit of Strasbourg (1964), while the sermons onJeremiah and Lamentations, volume 6 of the Supplementa, were edited by Rodolphe Peter, also of Strasbourg (1971); both volumes, as all in the series to date, have been impeccably transcribed and then handsomely published at Neukirchen- Vluyn by the Neukirchener Verlag des Erziehungsvereins GmbH.

Calvin scholars are generally familiar with the story of the manuscripts of Calvin's sermons, a story told by Bernard Gagnebin, late archivist of the BPU at Geneva, published in the prefatory matter of volume 2 of the Supplementa, pp. xiv- xxviii. In brief, beginning in 1549 a team of scribes, for the most part under the direction of a French refugee and shorthand expert named Denis Raguenier (arrived in Geneva in Sept. 1549, died 1560?), took down in shorthand and then transcribed an exact text (Calvin having preached extemporaneously). Thus the only word-for-

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