Louise Charlin Perrin Labé ( – 25 April 1566), also identified as La Belle Cordière ("The Fair Ropemaker") after her father's job, was a French Renaissance poet from Lyon.

Biography

Louise Labé was born in Lyon, into a family of ropemakers, surgeons, and butchers. Her father, Pierre Charly, was a successful ropemaker, who started a business on rue de l'Arbre sec, at the base of Saint Sébastien Hill in Lyon. When his first wife died in 1515, he married Etiennette Roybet, and had five children: Barthélemy, Francois, Mathieu, Claudine, and Louise. It is presumed that Louise Labé was born at some point between her father's wedding in 1516 and her mother's death in 1523.

Records show that Labé's father, despite his humble beginnings, eventually achieved some social prestige. For example, in 1534, he was summoned before the Assemblée de Consuls of the city of Lyon to approve and participate in the founding of a relief agency for the poor.

At some point, perhaps in a convent school, Labé received an education in foreign languages (Greek, Latin, Italian, and Spanish) and music, specifically the lute.

As a young woman, she was acclaimed as an extraordinary horsewoman and archer. Her early biographers called her "la belle Amazone" and report that she dressed in male clothing and fought as a knight on horseback in the ranks of the Dauphin (afterwards Henry II) at the siege of Perpignan. She was also said to have participated in tournament jousts performed in Lyon in honor of Henry II's visit.

Between 1543 and 1545 she married Ennemond Perrin, also a Lyon ropemaker, a marriage dictated in her father's will, and which established the succession of the rope manufacturing business he was involved in. The business must have been prosperous, since the couple purchased a townhouse with a large garden in 1551, and, in 1557, a country estate at Parcieux-en-Dombes near Lyon.

Lyon was the cultural centre of France in the first half of the sixteenth century and Labé hosted a literary salon that included many of the renowned Lyonnais poets and humanists, including Maurice Scève, Clement Marot, Claude de Taillemont, Pontus de Tyard, and Pernette du Guillet.

The poet Olivier de Magny, passing through Lyon on his way to Rome, fell in love with Labé, and is the likely subject of her love sonnets.

In 2005, Labé's work was included on the programme of a very prestigious exam in France, sparking a flurry of academic publications. The most remarked upon of these was the 2006 book Louise Labé: une créature de papier (Droz); discussed below.

The sonnets have been her most famous works following the early modern period, and were translated into German by Rainer Maria Rilke and into Dutch by Pieter Cornelis Boutens. They have been translated into English, maintaining the exact rhyme patterns of the originals, by poet Annie Finch (published in the same volume with a translation of Labé's prose by Deborah Lesko Baker, University of Chicago Press, 2006), and by Richard Siebuth in a volume published by NYRB (2014).

Marc Fumaroli and Mireille Huchon

In her 2006 book the Sorbonne professor and specialist of Rabelais Mireille Huchon controversially argued that, despite over four centuries of scholarship and biographical evidence to the contrary, Louise Labé was not the author of the works signed with her name but rather that these works were by the Lyonnais poets Maurice Scève, Olivier de Magny, Claude de Taillemont, Jacques Peletier du Mans, Guillaume des Autels, and others, and by the publisher Jean de Tournes. The conservative critic Marc Fumaroli called Huchon's argument "irrefutable" in the literature supplement of Le Monde. Numerous critics and scholars examined Huchon's essay and frequently found her reasoning absurd, judging that her interpretation of the biographical evidence seemed to show inexplicable bias and reliance on unfounded assumptions. The lack of any evidence in support of her thesis was a further reason for the ease with which many dismissed her ideas as mistaken and considered Huchon's work to have made no valuable contribution to scholarship. The list of eminent scholars opposing Huchon include Emmanuel Buron, Henri Hours, Bernard Plessy, Madeleine Lazard, Daniel Martin, Eliane Viennot, and many others. Despite strong objections from most Labé scholars, however, Huchon's audacious thesis has not entirely disappeared from view.

Works in English

  • Complete poetry and prose : a bilingual edition, Chicago, Ill.; London: University of Chicago Press, 2006. ,
  • Louise Labé's complete works, Troy, N.Y.: Whitston Pub. Co., 1986. ,
  • Debate of folly and love, New York: P. Lang, 2000. ,
  • Love sonnets, New York: New Directions, 1947.
  • Love sonnets & elegies, New York: New York Review Books, 2014. ,

See also

  • Pernette Du Guillet
  • Enzo Giudici

Notes

References

  • Marc Fumaroli's review of Mireille Huchon's book, published in Le Monde, May 5, 2006 . The links to this and many more published reactions to the book can be found on the Siefar website, http://www.siefar.org/debats/louise-labe.html
  • Louise Labé, Complete Poetry and Prose, ed. and trans. Deborah Lesko Baker and Annie Finch, University of Chicago Press, 2006.
  • Louise Labé, Œuvres completes, ed. François Rigolot, Flammarion, 2004. Critical edition and biographical chronology.
  • Madeleine Lazard, Louise Labé Lyonnaise, Librairie Artheme Fayard, 2004. Biography.
  • Enzo Giudici, Louise Labé, essai, 1981 .
  • Oeuvres poétiques / Louise Labé. précédées des Rymes de Pernette Du Guillet. avec une sélection de Blasons du corps féminin / édition présentée, établie et annotée par Françoise Charpentier. Gallimard, 1983

Bibliography

  • Hennigfeld, Ursula. Der ruinierte Körper. Petrarkistische Sonette in transkultureller Perspektive. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2008.
  • Cameron, Keith. "Louise Labé: Renaissance poet and feminist". New York: Berg, 1990.
  • A collection of 26 published responses to the debate, including biographies etc., many freely accessible online http://www.siefar.org/debats/louise-labe.html
  • Biography, Analysis
  • Other Women's Voices: Translations of women's writing before 1700: Louise Labé Contains links to online translations by a selection of different translators, essays and reviews.
  • University of Virginia's Gordon Project Louise Labe page Contains digital images of a 1556 edition of her works and background information.
  • Translations of 24 sonnets