Understanding Labé through questions of power and love Anonymous College

Louise Labé, as « le plus grand poète féministe de la Renaissance française, » often attempts to reshape the power dynamic inherent within classical, Petrarchan and contemporaneous renaissance love poetry. As a woman writing against this backdrop of well-established, widely disseminated, and almost entirely masculine corpus of love poetry, which she was acutely attuned to thanks to her education, Labé’s work explores in depth twin concepts of love and power. She establishes from the outset that as a female poet writing in this convention, her work examines the power dynamic in male-female relations. However, it is crucial to remember that the poetry itself is concerned with men and women in love, and consequently, the male-female interplay is always framed in terms of love, and as such themes of love and questions of power enjoy a mutually dependent relationship. Whilst the female poet’s power struggle must be born in mind, one must equally guard against a hegemonic proto-feminist discourse in order to fully understand Labé’s work. The array of self-consciously intertextual aspects of Labé’s poetry, which feature Ovid, Catullus and Petrarch amongst many others, incorporating their themes of love, reveal a reliance on themes of...