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Joachim Du Bellay's Occasional Poetry: the Poetics of Female Patronage Elizabeth Landers Washington University in St

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Joachim Du Bellay's Occasional Poetry: the Poetics of Female Patronage Elizabeth Landers Washington University in St Washington University in St. Louis Washington University Open Scholarship All Theses and Dissertations (ETDs) 1-1-2011 Joachim Du Bellay's Occasional Poetry: The Poetics of Female Patronage Elizabeth Landers Washington University in St. Louis Follow this and additional works at: https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/etd Recommended Citation Landers, Elizabeth, "Joachim Du Bellay's Occasional Poetry: The oeP tics of Female Patronage" (2011). All Theses and Dissertations (ETDs). 604. https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/etd/604 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by Washington University Open Scholarship. It has been accepted for inclusion in All Theses and Dissertations (ETDs) by an authorized administrator of Washington University Open Scholarship. For more information, please contact [email protected]. WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY IN ST. LOUIS Department of Romance Languages and Literatures Dissertation Examination Committee: Colette Winn, Chair Robert Henke Joseph Loewenstein Stamos Metzidakis Michael Sherberg Harriet Stone JOACHIM DU BELLAY’S OCCASIONAL POETRY: THE POETICS OF FEMALE PATRONAGE by Elizabeth Landers A dissertation presented to the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences of Washington University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy August 2011 Saint Louis, Missouri copyright by Elizabeth Landers 2011 Acknowledgments This project on Du Bellay’s occasional poetry would never have been completed without the help of many people. First and foremost I would like to thank Colette Winn for her unwavering support and encouragement. I have benefitted beyond measure not only from the model she sets as a teacher and scholar, but also from her ability to create community and draw fellow seiziemistes together around her docte table . I also want to thank my dissertation committee for their time and invaluable assistance. Harriet Stone and Stamos Metzidakis in particular have provided me with generous feedback and advice, not only on the current project but many times over the past years. Colleagues at the University of Missouri-St. Louis have contributed to this project in numerous ways: I am deeply grateful to Tanika Bush and Terry Thiel for making it possible for me to take a development leave during the 2009-2010 academic year. Susan Brownell, Pam Ashmore, and Beth Eckelkamp have all provided valuable support, as did my colleagues in the French section. Conversations with Susan Yoder- Kreger and Birgit Noll sustained me over many long semesters. Finally, my family and friends have nourished this work from the beginning. Most of all, Wolfram has been my coulonne seure , to whom I owe everything. ii Table of Contents Acknowledgments ii Introduction 1 Chapter One Bouquets: Du Bellay’s Poems to Marguerite de France 1549-1553 19 Chapter Two A Temple for Marguerite: Du Bellay’s Poems after Rome 99 Chapter Three Songs: Du Bellay’s Poems to Diane de Poitiers 212 Conclusion 288 Bibliography 292 iii Introduction Revaluing Du Bellay’s Occasional Poetry This study seeks to demonstrate that female patrons at the Valois court-- particularly Marguerite de France, and, to a lesser extent Diane de Poitiers--had a defining influence on both the career and the aesthetic choices of the sixteenth- century French poet Joachim Du Bellay. Many years ago Henri Chamard, an important early voice in twentieth-century Du Bellay studies, wrote that Du Bellay was uncomfortable as a court poet and that the majority of his occasional poetry for members of the royal family and their circle was of poor quality and painful to read. 1 Chamard’s judgment seems to have oriented Du Bellay studies for decades to follow. Although Du Bellay certainly wrote with frequency against “les poètes courtisans,” I believe that his collected works as a whole, and particularly his occasional poems, reveal a poet who, if not completely comfortable in court circles, nonetheless forged close ties to particular women at court. These women provided moral and intellectual patronage as much as they granted financial support, and their literary interests and individual personae gradually influenced both the form and content of his poetry. As for Chamard’s judgment of the quality of these poems, I note that his opinion was not shared by Du Bellay’s contemporaries. The first edition of Du Bellay’s collected works, assembled nearly ten years after his death by two of his friends, Guillaume Aubert de Poitiers and Jean Morel d’Embrun, included occasional 1 Chamard’s early twentieth-century edition remains the most complete to date, although a team of editors under the direction of Olivier Millet is currently working on a new edition of which only two volumes have been published. In his biography of Du Bellay, published in 1900, Chamard says that he will spend little time discussing Du Bellay’s first collection written for the Valois court, the Recueil de Poësie : “On ne m’en voudra pas de glisser à la hâte sur cette partie de l’ouvrage. Elle n’ajoute rien à la gloire de l’auteur. Rien ne montre aussi clairement que ces odes laborieuses comme il était peu fait pour ce genre de poésie. Le malheureux se met l’esprit à la torture pour savoir qu’inventer et que dire. […] Tout au plus pourrait-on mettre à part l’ode à Madame Marguerite, où les sentiments de l’humble poète revêtent une horreur religieuse qui n’est pas sans émotion” (225-26). 1 and praise poems to les grands .2 The inclusion of occasional poems in this edition seems to indicate that Du Bellay’s contemporaries considered them to be of equal importance and value to the collections that are more frequently read today. Twenty- first-century-readers undoubtedly struggle to find beauty or interest in occasional poems so far removed from their historical context, and find taxing the necessity of researching place names and proper names that no longer resonate. Sixteenth-century readers, however, must have found pleasure and meaning in reading verse that explicitly referred to members of extended and brilliant social networks. 3 D’Aubert and Morel are unlikely to have collected and reprinted these pieces nine years after Du Bellay’s death if they were not seen to be valuable. Scholars have rarely brought critical attention to Du Bellay’s occasional poems. His most commonly studied works are his manifesto La Deffence et illustration de la langue françoyse (1549, 1550), his early sonnet sequence titled L’Olive (1549), and the even more famous sonnet sequences that he wrote later in Rome: Les Antiquitez de Rome (1558) and Les Regrets (1558) . David Hartley is one of the few scholars who has worked on Du Bellay’s occasional poetry, but he has confined his studies to what he calls Du Bellay’s “political poetry,” defined as his “longer French poems on matters of state, domestic and international” (1 Circumstantial Verse of Joachim Du Bellay ). The ten long poems that Hartley edits in his critical edition of Du Bellay’s “circumstantial” verse are all addressed to the king or other male members of European royal families, and ignore the many poems that address royal women. 2 Chamard’s own edition is based on this original one, but he organized the collection by genre (sonnets, odes, discours , etc.) rather than keeping the original seemingly scattered order of the 1569 edition. 3 It should be noted, however, that the oblique references to some courtiers in Du Bellays Regrets were inscrutable even to contemporary readers: see Chamard’s citation of François Olivier’s letter to Jean Morel, in the introduction to volume II of his edition of Du Bellay (x-xi). 2 Past focus on Male Mentors, the King, and Ronsard This selective critical focus on pieces written to male leaders and war heroes is not unusual: histories of the Pléiade tend to focus on the members of this all-male group, with only passing reference to women--brief mention of wives, love interests who inspired poems, or female patrons quickly documented as sources of financial support (Weber, Chamard, Saulnier). Opening his study of the influence of classical rhetoric on Du Bellay’s poetry, Robert Griffin summarizes nicely the male world of the Collège de Coqueret where several of the Pléiade poets studied together. He describes a cohort of ambitious young men who were taught by erudite older men like Jean Dorat. They focused their studies on classical texts by such authors as Homer, Vergil, Cicero, and Quintilian (7-11). They also read Italian works by authors such as Petrarch and linguists like Speroni, and engaged with French logicians and linguists such as Pierre de la Ramée and Thomas Sebillet. The resulting impression is that the intellectual world of the Pléiade is grounded in patrifilial relationships: male teachers and mentors shaped their male students via models provided by male writers of antiquity, the Italian renaissance, or early French humanism. This impression of a uniquely masculine intellectual community would appear to be inaccurate. My study shows that the network of humanists within the walls of the Collège de Coqueret, while decidedly male, sought sustained relationships with women at the Valois court, and not only for financial benefit. Women such as Marguerite de France organized dinners that brought writers and thinkers together; they assembled libraries, initiated literary and philosophical discussions, offered young poets judgments and advice informed by the solid humanistic education they had received and often taken more seriously than their male siblings. Du Bellay’s 3 literary production is likely to have been quite different if he had not connected to this royal, female sphere early in his career. I document the resulting impact on his writing in the three chapters that follow. Claudie Martin-Ulrich identifies another scholarly trend that has tended to privilege the knowledge of masculine aspects of court society in sixteenth-century France: she documents the growth of studies of the figure of the prince, beginning in the mid 1970’s and continuing to the present (7-8).
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