Her Œuvres include two prose works: a feminist preface, urging women to write, that is dedicated to a young noblewoman of Lyon, Clémence de Bourges; and a dramatic allegory in prose entitled Débat de Folie et d'Amour (translated into English by Robert Greene in 1608),[1] which belongs to a long tradition with examples from antiquity through to the Middle Ages, a tradition that had gained contemporary prominence due to the controversial satire, Erasmus' Praise of Folly. The Débat, the most admired of her works in the sixteenth century, was used as the source for one of the fables of Jean de la Fontaine, and was translated into English by Robert Greene in 1584.
Her poetry consists of three elegies in the style of the Heroides of Ovid, and twenty-four sonnets that draw on the traditions of Neoplatonism and Petrarchism. The great theme of her sonnets are the longings, torments and satisfactions of a passionate love which, however noble, is very much of this world, with no metaphysical concepts evoked and no references to a more perfect world than this one. A critic such as Breghot du Lut, writing for the 1824 edition of her works, found that he must apologize to the reader for her explicitness of some of her works; Sainte-Beuve, in 1845, expressed something that was to become a refrain for readers and critics up to this day: despite her work showing that she was highly learned, this does not prevent her from seeming to speak to contemporary readers in a very direct way.
Her poetry was singled out among that of her contemporaries for special praise by Rilke, with Ferdimand Brunetière, in his 1900 article on the Pléiade and Lyonnese schools, writing that her poetry was the first time in French that passion was expressed with such vehemence and naiveté. Modern critics cite her rejection of the more showy or extravagant metaphors and poetic effects employed by poets such as Scève or Pernette du Guillet as one of the key components of her originality and appeal for the modern reader, with Jerry C. Nash writing in 1980
"Labé's lyrical voice is truly one of the best expressions in literature of artful simplicity, of a consistent and masterly synthesis of substance and form, of passion and poetry".
Readers have, from the middle of the last century, commented on how in her verse she presents women in a way that goes against prevailing attitudes about what a woman's nature was or what made a woman either praiseworthy or blameworthy, a feature which makes her appear more in step with modern ideas than her contemporaries were. The frank expression of female desire had previously been confined to comic genres such as fabliaux.[3][4]
In 2005, Labé's work was included on the programme of a very prestigious exam in France, sparking a flurry of academic publications. The most remarked upon of these was the 2006 book Louise Labé: une créature de papier (Droz); discussed below.
The sonnets have been her most famous works following the early modern period, and were translated into German by Rainer Maria Rilke and into Dutch by Pieter Cornelis Boutens. They have been translated into English, maintaining the exact rhyme patterns of the originals, by poet Annie Finch (published in the same volume with a translation of Labé's prose by Deborah Lesko Baker, University of Chicago Press, 2006), and by Richard Siebuth in a volume published by NYRB (2014).
Marc Fumaroli and Mireille Huchon
In her 2006 book the Sorbonne professor and specialist of Rabelais Mireille Huchon controversially argued that, despite over four centuries of scholarship and biographical evidence to the contrary, Louise Labé was not the author of the works signed with her name but rather that these works were by the Lyonnais poets Maurice Scève, Olivier de Magny, Claude de Taillemont, Jacques Peletier du Mans, Guillaume des Autels, and others, and by the publisher Jean de Tournes. The conservative critic Marc Fumaroli called Huchon's argument "irrefutable" in the literature supplement of Le Monde.[5] Numerous critics and scholars examined Huchon's essay and frequently found her reasoning absurd, judging that her interpretation of the biographical evidence seemed to show inexplicable bias and reliance on unfounded assumptions. The lack of any evidence in support of her thesis was a further reason for the ease with which many dismissed her ideas as mistaken and considered Huchon's work to have made no valuable contribution to scholarship. The list of eminent scholars opposing Huchon include Emmanuel Buron, Henri Hours, Bernard Plessy, Madeleine Lazard, Daniel Martin, Eliane Viennot, and many others. Despite strong objections from most Labé scholars, however, Huchon's audacious thesis has not entirely disappeared from view.[6]
