(c. 1520-1545)
Pernette Du Guillet's Rymes (1545) project a unique lyric voice in the history of French poetry of the Renaissance. Published soon after the poet's death at the age of twenty-five, her work examines her experiences with love in the light of Neoplatonic and Petrarchan traditions, both familiar to Renaissance readers, and reveals a young woman carefully constructing her own poetic identity in the face of her beloved's impressive learning and eloquence and the patriarchal world he represents.
A slim volume of the seventy poems left behind upon Du Guillet's death, Rymes was first published in 1545 by Jean de Tournes, one of the most important printers in sixteenth-century Lyons. Biographical details are scarce, but we do know that Pernette Du Guillet was well educated, married, and part of an active circle of poets that included Maurice Sceve* and Louise Labe.* She undoubtedly benefited from the unusually high level of support for women writers in Lyons in her day. In the prefatory letter to the Rymes, addressed to the ladies of Lyons, editor Antoine Du Moulin stresses Du Guillet's knowledge of music and lan-guages—her skill with several instruments, her knowledge of Italian and Latin, and her studies of Greek, for example—and calls his readers' attention to the poet as an exemplary model of learning linked with chastity and purity.
Du Guillet is believed to have been the inspiration for Sceve's D!!élie, published in 1544 in Lyons and she herself inscribed Sceve's name anagrammati-cally in her verse. The works of both poets met with success in the Renaissance; four editions of Du Guillet's Rymes appeared before the end of the century. After several ensuing centuries of relative obscurity, Rymes has once again become increasingly important to readers of French literature, in part for the strategies Du Guillet devised as a woman writing in a firmly patriarchal society and responding to its literary conventions, as well as for the combination in her poetry of admiration of the beloved's intellectual qualities, spirited critiques of the lover, and an examination of her role as participant in poetic exchange and Neoplatonic union.Rymes employs a variety of popular medieval and Renaissance poetic genres, including epigrams, songs, epistolary verse, and elegies. Her preference for short poems is clear in the predominance of eight- or ten-line epigrams. Her vocabulary generally reflects an abstract spirituality, but the poet also captures the essence of everyday encounters and very human emotions, including jealousy. The contrast between day (the life-giving light of the beloved) and night (the darkness in which she found herself before meeting him and before beginning to love and to write) is the central metaphor of the collection, although Du Guillet uses a variety of mythological images sparingly but effectively.
Du Guillet drew much of her inspiration from Neoplatonism, but also, to a lesser degree, from the Petrarchan tradition. In her poetry, chaste love and the Neoplatonic "Good" generally triumph over Petrarchan suffering and desire, although the poet clearly recognizes the latter's force and charm. At times sensuality becomes a subtext for the song of chaste, platonic love. While she recognizes the tension between the two forces, her ultimate goal remains a spiritual and intellectual union with the beloved, a goal she recognizes may only come about in verse.
Bibliography
F. Charpentier, ed., Louise Labeé, Oeuvres poeétiques, preéceédeées des Rymes de Pernette Du Guillet, 1983.
A. Jones, "Pernette Du Guillet: The Lyonnais Neoplatonist," in Women Writers of the Renaissance and Reformation, ed. K. M. Wilson, 1987.
Karen S. James