Excerpt - Iter: Gateway to the Middle Ages and Renaissance

30 Editor’s Introduction
the collection that convey alternately—or even simultaneously—
sensuality and chastity, independence of spirit and adoration of
the beloved’s intellectual powers, praise and criticism tempered
with humor, desire for spiritual union and a need for distance or
difference from the other.
Dialogue, Imitation, and the Lyric Voice
The poet’s transformation of a variety of literary conventions
contributes to the complexity of voice in the Rymes, enriching rather
than contradicting the all-encompassing, spiritual union in love
that this poetry projects as an ideal. Saulnier’s “Etude” examines the
many traditions upon which Du Guillet builds her “art of variations”:
medieval courtly love poetry, verse in the style of Marot and in the
Petrarchan mold, and poems inspired by Neoplatonism. To express
an ideal of unity, the poet avails herself of multiple lyric traditions,
creating a personal style that reinforces her independent identity and
voice. Despite her humble claims to the contrary, Du Guillet evidently
possessed her share of the extensive knowledge that she attributed to
Scève. The multiple and at times contradictory voices in the Rymes
represent a radical departure from the Délie. For Scève, as for Petrarch,
the canzoniere depends upon the silence of the idealized woman. The
lady’s unbroken silence and the torment of the lover are the necessary
conditions for poetic creation. 64
At the heart of many of Du Guillet’s
poems, however, is an exchange—of light, of knowledge, or of speech—
with the beloved, with other contemporaries, with Amour (Cupid),
with the reader, or with a combination of interlocutors. Furthermore,
many of these texts conclude with the speaker’s refusal to reduce her
beloved poet to silence. Dialogue represents a central motif of the
collection, with numerous poems evoking a conversational exchange
between lovers, or at least allowing the reader to “overhear” the
speaker’s words to another. 65
64. In both the Petrarchan and the Neoplatonic theories of love, the woman remains the
silent object of the male gaze and desire; her silence fuels the speech of the lover, whose
poetry expresses the stages and states of his suffering. In the Neoplatonic mode, this
situation may permit the lover’s ascent to a higher spiritual realm, but in practice this applies
only to men.
65. For an examination of the types of linguistic exchanges depicted in the Rymes and the
lexical markers of dialogue, see Karen Simroth James, “On veult responce avoir: Pernette du
Guillet’s Dialogic Poetics,” in A Dialogue of Voices: Feminist Theory and Bakhtin, ed. Karen
Hohne and Helen Wussow (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 171–97,