Louise Labe was the daughter of a middle-class rope maker in Lyon, France, and as a child received education in languages, music, and riding. In 1543 she married another rope maker, Ennemond Per-rin, her senior by almost three decades. Around 1556, she left the literary circles of Lyon to live in the countryside, where the plague brought a premature end to her life.
Labe began writing her first sonnets in 1546. In these sonnets she employs not only the form but also many of the themes used by the Italian poet petrarch. In 1552 she began to write The Debate Between Folly and Love, an expressive work full of diverse structures and several voices. In the next year she began writing her Elegies and in 1555 published The Complete Works of Louise Labe of Lyon, which was reprinted several times within the next year. Some biographers attribute Labe’s popularity to the increasing social prominence of women in the mid-16th century, when literature by and about women became fashionable. Certain critics accused Labe of being immodest and unwomanly, while others praised her lavishly, considering her an admirable writer and exemplary woman.
Labe’s narrative voice is that of a woman who possesses intellectual and poetic power and is highly aware of herself. In her verse she combines the Italian forms with the traditions of the early Greek poet Sappho to write about female desire and to characterize women as being both intellectual and erotic, with mental as well as material abilities. Labe continually resisted prevailing cultural notions that limited women to roles as courtesans, companions, or domestic servants; instead, her poetry presents women as active, independent subjects who are capable of thought as well as feeling. In The Debate Between Folly and Love, Labe scatters her poetry with allusions to classical mythology that demonstrate her learning, and gives her characters sly observations about the way wisdom is underappreciated in society. For instance, the character of Mercury makes a point about how often folly prevails in the world, observing that “for every wise man who is talked about on earth, there will be ten thousand fools who will be popular with the common people.”
Labe’s shorter poems abound with themes and images that express passionate love and lofty heights of feeling, as can be seen in these lines from Sonnet 18 (translated by Edith Farrell):
Kiss me. Again. More kisses I desire.
Give me one your sweetness to express.
Give me the most passionate you possess.
Four I’ll return, and hotter than the fire.
Labe’s women are not crushed by disappointment or despair, however; when the narrator of the second elegy addresses a lover who has left her for another, she taunts him for not seeing her worth, declaring:
And know that elsewhere there’s no one like me.
I don’t say that she might have more beauty,
But never will a woman love you more
Nor bring more fame to lay it at your door.
Throughout her work, Labe demanded that women be recognized and acknowledged as capable of intelligent action as well as desire.
Labe’s manuscripts and their circulation are proof that women had active roles as authors, readers, and patrons of the artistic renaissance taking place in France in the 16th century. Labe herself was known to entertain poets, writers, and other learned people in her private salon, and the writer Pernette du Guillet was a great friend of hers. In her writing Labe encouraged women to write and sell their own works and also to support each other in a female literary community. She firmly believed in self-improvement through education for women, and expressed this in the dedication of her Works. Addressing her friend Clemence de Bourges, she conveys her characteristic beliefs that writing is a form of self-knowledge and that intellectual pleasures are preferable to sensual ones. She encourages her female readers to exercise their minds, inspire one another, and devote themselves to the study of literature and the sciences to gain recognition from and equality with men. Like an earlier Frenchwoman, Christine de pisan, Labe’s work expresses the voice of an educated and feeling woman who was skilled enough to use and refuse convention where necessary, making a valuable contribution to the French Renaissance as well as a call for the emancipation of women.
English Versions of Works by Louise Labe
Debate of Folly and Love: A New English Translation with the Original French Text. Translated by Anne Bourbon. New York: Peter Lang, 2000.
Louise Labe: Sonnets. Translated by Graham D. Martin. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1972.
Louise Labe’s Complete Works. Edited and translated by Edith R. Farrell. Troy, N.Y.: Whitson Publishing, 1986.
Works about Louise Labe
Baker, Deborah Lesko. The Subject ofDesire: Petrarchan Poetics and the Female Voice in Louise Labe. West Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue University Press, 1996.
Cameron, Keith. Louise Labe: Renaissance Poet and Feminist. Oxford, England: Berg Publishers, 1991.
Moore, Mary B. Desiring Voices: Women Sonneteers and Petrarchism. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2000.
