Caroline Hatton
Yale University

La lame en vers de l’Amant Vert

In his two Épîtres de l’Amant Vert, written in 1505 and published in 1511, Jean Lemaire de Belges adopts the voice of the recently deceased parrot of his protectress, Marguerite d’Autriche. In the first letter, the lovelorn bird explains the torments of abandonment he suffers upon his lady’s departure for a political mission and proclaims his intention to end his life by throwing himself into the jaws of a dog. In the second, the unfortunate green lover writes to Marguerite from beyond the grave, telling her of the afterlife. As both the playful polyphony of the title and the supple nature of the affectionate yet accusatory theme of the works suggest, however, there is more than one level on which the Épîtres can be read.

My paper will focus on how Lemaire, through the medium of these love letters, impugns the precarious status of and restrictions placed upon the poet during the earliest years of the period we now call the Renaissance. Beyond providing an understanding of a particularly witty, well-written and under-studied work, however, my presentation will also, using the Épîtres as a springboard for a more general discussion, offer a vision of a period crucial to understanding the history of activism in French literature.

Jean Lemaire belongs chronologically and stylistically to a group of poets now called the ‘rhétoriqueurs.’ Long dismissed as frivolous and decadent, the works of Lemaire and his fellow rhétoriqueurs have only recently begun to be considered as serious literary texts. The polemical aspect of their writings, however, has not yet been sufficiently addressed even though it is, in large part, through works such as the Épîtres, in which the intricacies of verbal expression serve at once as a rhetorical shield designed to protect the poet from censorship and persecution and as an implicit attack of the need for such protection, that la littérature engagée was able to make the transition from the highly metaphorical satire of the Middle Ages to the plein-air polemics of Renaissance masters of literary activism such as Ronsard and d’Aubigné.