Female Authorship, Patronage, and Translation in Late Medieval France: From Christine de Pizan to Louise Labe

Under what conditions did women in late medieval France learn to read and write? What models of female erudition and authorship were available to them in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries? These questions, often difficult to answer in the extant historical record, are approached here via a number of perspectives, namely, the patronage and book ownership of women between the late medieval and early modern periods, and their involvement in the translation of works from Latin to French. Through a close analysis of the female patronage and manuscript production leading up to the early modern period, this new study sheds important light on the development of female book ownership, reading practices, and patronage, and, ultimately, female authorship in the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries. The monograph shows how female book owners in the fifteenth century in particular were provided visual and rhetorical models of female erudition and savoir-models which further encouraged these practices in the generations to follow. In particular, a focus on translations from Latin to French produced for and by women reveals the ways in which female patrons participated in the production of not only books they were able to read in French, but also individual manuscript exemplars that put forward new conceptual frameworks around women’s reading practices. Chapters examine adaptations and translations of Ovid’s Heroides and Boccacio’s De mulieribus claris; the libraries and patronage of Anne de Bretagne and Louise de Savoie; and works by Christine de Pizan, Anne de Graville, Marguerite de Navarre, and Louise Labe.