Kelly D. Peebles
Book Review
Jeanne d’Albret, Letters from the Queen of Navarre with an
Ample Declaration. Edited and
translated by Kathleen M. Llewellyn, Emily E. Thompson, and Colette H. Winn.
The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe: The Toronto Series,
Vol. 43, ITER Academic Press & Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance
Studies (Toronto, Canada & Tempe, Arizona, 2016), 116 pp. ISBN: 9780866985451
“Among
an infinite number of examples of suffering, humiliation, and dishonor that
they inflicted on [my husband], I will recount one here, which, if it were
fiction would need a poet to depict it well, and if it were of little
consequence, would need an orator to color it. But the naked truth of this
tragicomedy provides its own ornament.”
—Jeanne d’Albret, Ample
Declaration (53)
1>
Writing six years after the death of her husband, Antoine de Bourbon, Jeanne
d’Albret seeks to rehabilitate his memory and her reputation by exposing the
pernicious machinations of her chief nemeses at the French court, François de
Guise and his brother, the Cardinal de Lorraine.[1] In
her Ample Declaration, a collection
of letters followed by an explanation of their content first printed in 1569,
the author sets up a premise of truthfulness. In addition to the declaration
above, Jeanne frequently peppers her text with affirmations of its veracity: “I
truly know,” “you have witnessed,” “I [...] explain in my letters,” “you can
see from this,” “everyone knows,” “there I pointed out,” “as God is my
witness,” (43, 50, 51, 53, 57, 69). There are many such examples.
2>
A decade earlier, Jeanne had been instrumental in the posthumous printing of a book
written by her mother, Marguerite de Navarre (20). In the prologue to the Heptaméron, Marguerite’s collection of
tales first printed in 1558, the author sets up a specific set of rules that
each of ten storytellers will follow: the tales will be truthful, based solely
on eyewitness testimony or heard from a trustworthy source, and they will be
devoid of “rhetorical ornament,” so as to avoid bending the truth. By telling
“the unadulterated truth,” each storyteller illustrates a life lesson, many of
which focus on religious, political, and familial devotion, often critiquing social
practices or exposing corruption in the church.[2] While
Jeanne publicly declared her Calvinist faith in December of 1560, Marguerite
never formally broke with the Catholic church. However, she played an essential
role in promoting early church reform in France and in protecting those fleeing
religious persecution, including John Calvin.[3]
3>
Although the Ample Declaration is a
very different type of work from her mother’s writings, Jeanne also sets out to
demonstrate her devotion to God, to the French king, and to her family lineage,
three preoccupations of which she reminds the reader nearly as often as her
truthfulness. To that end, Jeanne exposes corruption at the French court, plots
that rendered difficult her devotion and harmed (or threatened to harm) the
objects thereof. Thus, the works of mother and daughter have much in common
despite their differences. As Kathleen Llewellyn, Emily Thompson, and Colette
Winn convincingly point out in their introduction, Jeanne relies both on
epistolary diplomacy to pacify and to make requests of her interlocutors (the
king, the queen mother, the king’s brother, her brother-in-law, and the queen
of England), and on literary conventions associated with the still-popular
genre of the novella. While she eschews all poetic and rhetorical ornament, her
manner of narrating intercalated stories and reproducing the atmosphere of oral
storytelling is an effective strategy for “dramatizing events and structuring
them into narrative modules.” What this does is provide a “mnemonic evocation
of specific historical moments” (21). In other words, Jeanne manipulates the familiar
story-telling and organizational practices of the novella (practices used in
her mother’s Heptaméron) in order to
ease her readers into understanding the events leading up to 1568 and persuade
them to accept her decision to leave Navarre for the Protestant stronghold of
La Rochelle.
4>
This was a complicated situation. But just as Jeanne guides her reader through
events in her Ample Declaration, so
do the editors guide us through the historical context in their highly
approachable, ample introduction of 35 pages. Approximately half of that space is
devoted to situating Jeanne's work within of the years leading up to the Third
War of Religion (1568-1570). At the time, the heads of the most prominent noble
families were pitted one against another as they jockeyed for power and sought
to realize their religious and political ambitions. Charles IX of the reigning Valois
family sought to stabilize his reign and pacify factions. Jeanne’s husband Antoine
sought to regain lost territory and ensure the place of his son (the future
Henri IV) at court. Because of this, his religious faith turned in the
direction of the political winds, or as Jeanne puts it, “he embrac[ed] the
ephemeral at the expense of the everlasting” (51). The staunch Catholic François
de Guise, whose niece, Mary, Queen of Scots, was the widow of the recently
deceased François II, fiercely protected his favored position and influence at
the French court and, according to Jeanne, plotted to assassinate her husband
and his Bourbon brothers. But the wives, mothers, and daughters of these men
also played central roles in the religious, political, and literary life at
court: Catherine de’ Medici (mother of Charles IX and regent), Anne d’Este
(wife of François de Guise and daughter of the Protestant-leaning Renée de
France), and Catherine de Bourbon (daughter of Antoine and Jeanne), to name but
a few.
5>
The great interest of Jeanne’s Ample
Declaration, which the editors carefully highlight, is the insight that it
gives us into just what types of roles these women played. Indeed, as is the
goal of this series, this volume highlights an “other voice,” one that has not
yet received the same scholarly attention as her male counterparts. However, Winn,
Llewellyn, and Thompson show us the relevance of Jeanne’s work for students and
scholars of a variety of disciplines. In addition to their discussion of how
Jeanne constructed her image via epistolary correspondence and organized and
presented that information using practices associated with the novella, which
will interest literary students and scholars, the editors also discuss the
influence of religious polemic and memoirs in the second half of their
introduction (14-35), which may pique the interest of historians. We learn, for
example, that just as Protestant polemic, the Ample Declaration “was designed to sway the emerging public opinion
and vilify Catholics while rehabilitating the image of Protestants” (27).
Memoirs serve a similar function, for at the time, “the memoirist aimed either
to bring to light certain truths by relating events personally witnessed or to
inform posterity of an injustice committed against the author.” As the editors
point out, “Jeanne writes with both objectives in mind” (31). And indeed, they
do an admirable job of discussing the polyvalent nature of Jeanne’s work and
suggesting ways to mine the text that are pertinent to various areas of
specialization.
6>
The critical apparatus of this volume benefits greatly from each editor’s area
of scholarly expertise. My only quibble concerns treatment of both primary and
secondary sources in the bibliography. While the list of secondary sources is comprehensive,
spanning religious history and literature, additional references to French Calvinism
and the Wars of Religion would have been useful to the reader, such as, for
example, the work of historians Hugues Daussy and Raymond Mentzer. The editors
identify which edition of the letters and Ample
Declaration on which they base their translation (a 1570 compilation titled
Histoire de nostre temps, contenant un
recueil des choses mémorables passées & publiées pour le faict de la
religion & estat de France depuis l’edict de la pacification du 23 Jour de
mars, jusqu’au present), but they do not identify which sixteenth-century
copies they were able to consult, nor do they indicate where to find other
sixteenth-century primary sources listed in the bibliography. As they note in
the introduction, one may find sixteenth-century primary sources on the USTC
(Universal Short Title Catalog), and while this is an extremely useful resource,
USTC entries do not always account for digitized source texts. This quibble is
admittedly minor, and it is important to point out that the critical apparatus of
this volume is far superior to that of the 2007 French-language edition.[4] In
this 2016 English-language edition, generous footnotes gloss important figures
and place names, explain complex political and administrative practices,
untangle family relationships, clarify chronological ambiguities, and point the
reader to relevant background reading. The translation itself is artfully done.
It reads fluidly and manages to capture the “feel” of the original French while
at the same time rearranging syntax or modernizing the vocabulary when
necessary to transfer the message effectively. Within the translation, the
editors indicate the pagination of their source text with square brackets, which
greatly facilitates comparison with the original French for those who are able
to access a copy of the 1570 edition. Following the translation are a brief
chronology of events spanning the period of 1559-1572, several genealogical
tables (Valois, Bourbon, and Guise families), and maps indicating Jeanne’s
territories at the time of her Ample Declaration.
Students, instructors, and scholars of sixteenth-century French history,
literature, culture, and gender studies will want to have a copy of this book on
their shelf.
_____
Notes:
[1] For a detailed study of their ambitions and machinations,
see Stuart Carroll, Martyrs &
Murderers: The Guise Family and the Making of Europe (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2009).
[2] Marguerite de Navarre, The Heptameron, trans. Paul Chilton
(London: Penguin, 2004), 68-70.
[3] For further contextual information on Marguerite de Navarre
and her network, Jonathan Reid’s two-volume biography is an important resource.
King’s Sister – Queen of Dissent:
Marguerite of Navarre (1492-1549) and her Evangelical Network (Leiden:
Brill, 2009). Those considering adopting this volume in a course may also find inspiration
in Approaches to Teaching Marguerite de
Navarre’s Heptaméron, ed. Colette Winn (New York: MLA, 2007).
[4] Bernard Berdou d’Aas, ed. Jeanne d’Albret reine de Navarre et vicomtesse de Béarn. Lettres
suivies d’une Ample Déclaration (Biarritz: Atlantica, 2007).
_____
Kelly
D. Peebles is
Associate Professor of French at Clemson University. She is the editor and
translator of Jeanne Flore’s Tales and Trials of Love, vol. 33 of The
Other Voice in Early Modern Europe (CRRS / Iter, 2014), and has articles
forthcoming in the Journal of Medical Humanities and Women
in French.
_____
APPOSITIONS:
Studies
in Renaissance / Early Modern
Literature and Culture,
Literature and Culture,
http://appositions.blogspot.com/,
ISSN: 1946-1992,
ISSN: 1946-1992,
Volume
Ten (2017): Artefacts
_____
No comments:
Post a Comment