During the third year of my Bachelor’s degree, I began to delve into early modern women’s writing. For my undergraduate dissertation, I examined the role of Marguerite de Navarre as playwright and patroness in the Querelle des femmes, a literary debate about the nature and status of women which spanned the late medieval and early modern periods. In the process, I became stimulated by questions of women’s agency and the ways in which it was experienced and imagined in the early modern period. Paired with contemporary discussions about intersectional feminism, the burka debate and Women’s Marches which rippled across the world, I was inspired to explore these questions in my own DPhil project.
My research considers responses to modesty, including the limitations and freedoms of modesty, in the works of four sixteenth-century French women’s writers. In the early modern period, modesty has great prominence in the lives of women. Indeed, conduct manual writer, Juan Luis Vives, depicted it as one of the fundamental qualities to which all women must adhere, alongside chastity and silence. Deriving from the Latin pudor, modesty was linked to shame. In the eyes of Aristotle it was an emotion or passion which was revealed to others through blushing. Later, Thomas Aquinas defined modesty through a more moralistic lens, arguing that it stemmed from The Fall; Adam and Eve had to hide their ‘parties pudibundes’ (private parts). In sixteenth-century usage, modesty generally became known as a good shame, and was inextricably linked to chastity and honour. This was not to say that modesty was a stable term; one of the biggest debates centred around its natural or artificial origins. While Erasmus of Rotterdam declared that nature required couples to conceal their bodies from each other, even in the privacy of the bedroom, Thomas More implied the opposite in his Utopia.
Despite modesty’s governance over the lives and sexuality of women in the early modern period, my chosen women writers – Marguerite de Navarre, Les Dames des Roches and Gabrielle de Coignard – find ways of challenging, reconfiguring and undermining its significance in their literary texts and gaining agency for themselves in the process. A striking example of this is found in the poetry of Catherine des Roches. She was raised by her mother, Madeleine des Roches, in late sixteenth-century Poitiers. For the entirety of her life, Catherine chose to remain unmarried and childless and pursue her passions for writing and learning. Estienne Pasquier, a participant of her poitevin salon, expressed his concern with this decision in a letter to his friend Pierre Pithou. He argued that it was a shame for Catherine not to become a wife, especially in light of the many admirers that she had gained. One of these admirers was Pasquier himself. At a salon meeting, he spotted a flea resting on her bosom; his wonder at this sight inspired the composition of La Puce de Madame des Roches. In this anthology, male poets revel in their desire for her and relegate her to the position of the silent beloved. Pasquier himself pens a poem in which he reveals his jealousy of the male flea who sucks blood from Catherine’s breast. Catherine’s own response directly challenges this objectification. After initially entertaining the depiction of her body as a site of eroticism, she swiftly rejects it and transforms her flea into a female nymph who finds her origins in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. In the process of sheltering Syrinx, Catherine’s body becomes a place of knowledge and refuge; no longer is it wrapped up in shame and desire, but rather it is symbolic of female honour. Catherine takes her readers on a journey which begins with male desire and ends with the act of writing the female body, as a practise that can liberated her from the chains of modesty.
Although my work is focused on the sixteenth century, studying questions of women’s agency and voice in this period has become very relevant to my own experience as a student at the University. The works that I have examined have made me think more deeply about my own agency and the impact that I can have in various spaces within and beyond the University. Over the last few years at Oxford, I have become my College’s MCR President, pushing to the forefront issues of inequality, as well as becoming involved in student journalism and access and outreach initiatives. My decision to take up these various responsibilities has been partly inspired by the bravery, creativity and empowerment that my chosen women writers demonstrate in taking up the pen. As a woman of colour I have found it interesting to examine how my chosen writers respond to the social, cultural and political conditions that have determined their lives and their work to challenge, alter and, in some cases, dismantle those which have traditionally held them back as women. All of this has made me think about the environments and structures which have shaped my own place in the world. At a time in which activist movements, such as Black Lives Matter, have taken on more momentum and across the world discussions of intersectionality, allyship and equality, diversity and inclusion have been raised more frequently, I have looked to my four women writers to think about my own ability helping to challenge the status quo, through writing or other mediums.
What started off as a passion to explore sixteenth-century French women’s writing has very quickly become an all-encompassing project which has not only questioned my understanding of modesty and women’s agency in the early modern period and in our current times, but also caused me to think about how these themes relate to my own experience as a student and woman of colour. During a time in which I have become more involved in activism and more aware of the discourses and structures that govern the society in which we live, my project has given me the greatest life lesson of all: I have a voice and I should use it.