Epistolary positions: Gender and authority in medieval and early modern French letters.

Abstract

In medieval and early modern France, letter writing offered women and men access to a unique type of discursive authority. Through an examination of epistolary form and convention as promoted by the <italic>ars dictaminis </italic>, I argue that writers actively negotiated letter-writing practices to create subject positions and engage in dynamics unavailable to them outside of letters. These negotiations take varied forms in selected epistolary writings from the eleventh through the sixteenth century. In the verse epistles of Baudri of Bourgueil and Constance of Angers, a stylized genre is employed to stage a contradictory relationship that would be illicit outside the space of letters. This literary staging, undermined by Baudri's insistent defenses of writing as harmless and Constance's contradiction of this harmlessness, demonstrates how troped forms are manipulated to create unexpected authoritative positions. Heloise and Abelard employ letters to contest the terms of their relationship and to enact it, engaging in performances that show how letters act on their readers and writers. In her varied epistolary writings, Christine de Pizan exploits the epistle as a material object, a coded set of behaviors, a platform for social advocacy, and an authorizing genre, demonstrating that women can successfully access authoritative discourse, and that letters are a privileged field in which to make and perform this claim. The correspondence of Marguerite de Navarre and Guillaume Briconnet exploits epistolary dynamics of call and response, supplication and acquiescence or refusal, reinforcing their mutual need and authority in their respective realms. It demonstrates the survival of medieval epistolary practices in early-modern France, and the limits of letters for providing spiritual consolation and effecting spiritual change. Through a close reading of selected letters and the manipulation of formal prescriptions and conventions governing their composition, I recuperate letters as more than rhetorical exercises, and suggest that they are a site of performance---of authority, agency, and gender. By examining letters for what they do as well as what they say, my research suggests that for women in particular, letters offered ways to challenge and reconfigure gender stereotypes that traditionally excluded them from the authority associated with participation in epistolary discourse.