Literary Criticism (1400-1800)

Deschamps, Eustache | Deborah M. Sinnreich-Levi (essay date 1992)

Deborah M. Sinnreich-Levi (essay date 1992)

SOURCE: Sinnreich-Levi, Deborah M. “The Female Voice of the Male Poet: Eustache Deschamps' Voix Féminiśe.” In Voices in Translation: The Authority of “Olde Bookes” in Medieval Literature, edited by. Deborah M. Sinnreich-Levi and Gale Sigal, pp. 207-18. New York: AMS Press, 1992.

[In this essay, Sinnreich-Levi refutes the notion that Deschamps was solely a misogynist poet by examining several poems written in a female voice and depicting women sympathetically.]

While the fourteenth-century French poet Eustache Deschamps is known for his anti-feminist stance, typified in Le Miroir de mariage, he did write at least fifty-two poems whose speakers are women. And while it is true that the number of anti-feminist poems Deschamps wrote far outnumbers the number of pro-feminist poems, and certainly outnumbers the number of poems in women's voices, it can not be ignored that one of...

[The entire page is 3843 words long]

Join eNotes

The above is a free excerpt. Get total access to this content with the:

Lookup any word on eNotes with our dictionary. Highlight the word and press SHIFT + D for a definition, or SHIFT + T for a synonym.