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Female Complaintes: Laments of Venus, Queens, and City Women in Late Sixteenth-Century France*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Kate van Orden
Kate van Orden*
Affiliation:
University of California, Berkeley
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Abstract

This essay studies a large repertory of French laments (complaintes,) written in the voices of women. As a feminine counterpart to masculine love lyric, the complainte arose from an alternative poetics, treating subjects excluded from fin amors, such as death, crime, and war. Essentially, lyric assigned erotic longing to men and mourning to women. The unusual subject matter accommodated by the complaintes, coupled with a set of material and musical forms locating them amid the cultures of cheap print, psalmody, and street song, ultimately embroiled them in the battles of the religious wars. Thus female voices came to trumpet confessional politics in songs that levied lyric, gender, and faith to serve in civil war.

Type
Studies
Information
Renaissance Quarterly , Volume 54 , Issue 3 , Autumn 2001 , pp. 801 - 845
Copyright
Copyright © Renaissance Society of America 2001

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Footnotes

*

Research for this essay was carried out at Columbia University during a Mellon Fellowship at the Society of Fellows. I thank the Society and my colleagues there for their support. Portions of this essay were read at colloquia at the University of Pennsylvania (February, 1997), the University of California, Berkeley (November, 1997), and the University of Colorado, Boulder (February, 1998), where helpful comments abounded. Special thanks go to Frank Dobbins, Martha Feldman, James Haar, Timothy Hampton, Daniel Heartz, Donna Cardamone Jackson, and Anthony Newcomb, who read this work at various stages of its preparation, to the Renaissance Quarterly readers — especially François Rigolot and Carla Zecher — for their extensive and detailed comments, to Frédéric de Buzon for his invaluable assistance transcribing the letter of Catherine d'O, and to Richard Cheetham for seeting the musical examples. Finally, I must thank Ellen Hargis, David Douglass, and The King's Noyse, who brought this music to life again. I formulated my first ideas about this tepertory while corresponding with Ellen and David about songs in the feminine voice from Renaissance France and have had the pleasure of hearing both "Laissez la verde couleur" and Elizabeth of Austria's lament in concert. The latter is now available on Le jardin de mélodies, Harmonia Mundi USA, HMU 907194 and, for me, epitomizes the sound of the complainte.

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