SOURCE: Robbins-Herring, Kittye Delle. “Hélisenne de Crenne: Champion of Women's Rights.” In Women Writers of the Renaissance and Reformation, edited by Katharina M. Wilson, pp. 177-218. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987.

[In the following excerpt, an introduction to a translation of excerpts from de Crenne's works, Robbins-Herring contends that de Crenne is a true Renaissance feminist and that her works—which are sometimes conventional, sometimes avant-garde, and which often theorize on morality and the nature of men and women—show her to be an early advocate for women's rights.]

Hélisenne de Crenne, the name that Marguerite Briet chose to use for herself as the author-heroine of Les Angoysses douloureuses qui procedent d'amours, is more than a mask to protect an aristocratic lady from scandal. Revealing as much as concealing, it is a double metaphor for her relation to her book, wherein the romanesque prénom of Hélisenne, appropriate to epic and romance, is associated with the actual estate of Crenne or Crasnes, her husband's lands near Coucy. Her story itself likewise joins histoire vécue with literary reminiscence to recount the phases of an obsessive passion that even today has the power to shock the reader. Hélisenne's fictive autobiography seems to be based in large part on Marguerite's own experiences, shaped and colored in the telling (and quite probably in the original living) by prior literary tradition—art imitates life that imitates art.

Hélisenne/Marguerite must have fascinated sixteenth-century readers—as she continues to fascinate us—with this play of mirrors. She invites her public to guess her identity by planting a myriad of clues in the text of her pseudo-autobiography. She herself explores in her writing many of the contradictions involved in self-expression, both literary and amatory. Like that other, more famous Marguerite, the queen of Navarre (whom she knew at least by reputation), she is paradoxically typical and unique.

Her work is typical in that it incarnates much of characteristic Renaissance thought: the cult of antiquity with its enthusiasm for ornate discourse full of rare words and esoteric mythological references, the taste for melodrama often oddly mingled with philosophical debate, the contrast between colorful realistic details and austere moral maxims in the same narrative. Helen Waldstein and Suzanne Loriente, in their respective dissertations, find in Hélisenne the true spirit of a Renaissance feminist, champion of her sex in the Querelle des Femmes, eager to prove herself in the Republic of Letters.¹

And yet, as Paule Demats points out, Hélisenne's story is unique and exemplary in the intensity of its feeling and in the living paradigm it provides of courtly love as erotic obsession in sixteenth-century France.² Marguerite Briet, transforming her intimate journal into a novel of passion, creates herself as love's artist. She simultaneously illustrates the perils of immoderate desire—like one of Marguerite of Navarre's hapless heroines—and transcends those perils through her art. If, as she warns her lady readers, the price she has paid is great, she still has the satisfaction of getting her money's worth in emotion.

Research by Louise Loviot, Abel Lefranc, and more recently, V.-L. Saulnier has established the outline of Marguerite Briet's life from contemporary documents that supplement her own writings.³ The key passage identifying Marguerite with her pen name occurs in a Latin chronicle De Abbavilla. In translation, it reads as follows: “In May 1540 a very learned lady, born in Abbeville, named Marguerite Briet but known to the public as Hélisenne de Crenne, gained fame in French poetry in the noble city of Paris.” Hélisenne's works (a novel, a collection of letters, an allegorical treatise, and a translation of the first four books of the Aeneid) were all published in Paris in the years from 1538 to 1541, with editions of her collected Oeuvres appearing five times from 1543 through 1560. We may reasonably assume that she frequently visited the capital during these periods, especially as she possessed properties near the city and showed in her writing a lively appreciation for Paris as an intellectual center.

Marguerite and her husband, Philippe Fournel, seigneur de Crasnes, had a son, Pierre Fournel, who was a student at the University of Paris in 1548, when his father arranged for him to receive an allowance of fifty pounds tournois. Paule Demats concludes from this information that Marguerite was at least thirty-four years old in 1548 (assuming that she was no less than sixteen at her son's birth), but that she was probably a good bit older, as her sizable literary production implies “un assez long travail” during the 1530s and 1540s.⁴ Hélisenne, however, states that she herself was married to her husband at a very early age (shortly after her eleventh birthday); if Marguerite's experience parallels her heroine's here, she may have been younger than Demats thinks in 1548. At any rate, Marguerite Briet was probably born between 1500 and 1515, and the events of her extramarital love affair must have occurred in the half-dozen years preceding the 1538 publication of Les Angoysses, so that she would have been in her twenties or early thirties when she first met the handsome young man who was to inspire her passion. Still young enough to burn with appetit sensuel, yet a mature woman by Renaissance standards, with at least one child, and after years of reasonably contented married life (her husband, Hélisenne writes, had known how to win the affection of his child bride), Marguerite was suddenly struck by a blinding erotic obsession.

Hélisenne's story aligns her with a series of romantic heroines from Guinevere and Boccaccio's Fiammetta to Anna Karenina and beyond; like her real-life contemporary Louise Labé, she risks marriage, wealth, and social status, the loss of family and friends, for a fickle lover. The jouvenceau or adolescent whom she calls Guenelic is scarcely worth her sacrifices—his only merit, Demats notes acidly, is his physical beauty.⁵ In part 1 of the three-part novel, the most autobiographical section (parts 2 and 3 are more complimentary but less historical), Hélisenne paints a frequently unflattering portrait of her beloved; he is self-centered, tactless, even cruel, and his thoughtless boasting of his conquest endangers his mistress's reputation and her very life.

At the end of part 1 the author-heroine has been imprisoned by her jealously angry husband; in her isolation she turns to writing her life story in order to console herself, while hoping for eventual rescue by her lover. There is no evidence that the historical Guenelic ever saw his lady again, but it is likely that Marguerite Briet was indeed incarcerated by her husband for a time and that she began to write in prison (as did such celebrated writers as Malory and Charles d'Orléans). By 1552, if not earlier, she was living apart from Philippe Fournel and legally de luy sepparee quant aux biens—that is, separated from him and in control of her own property—as the text of a grant she made in that year specifies. She does not seem to have actually ended her marriage, perhaps because of social and economic pressures against such disunion. Marguerite, who belonged to a rich and important family in Picardy, was probably wealthier than her husband: in Les Angoysses, Hélisenne's husband threatens to leave her, adding scornfully that he does not want any of her property because he does not wish to profit from the possessions of “a lascivious woman.” In Le Songe (her allegorical dream dialogue), however, La Dame Amoureuse plans to purchase her husband's consent to a separation by dividing equally with him the lands which are by inheritance hers alone.

Saulnier believes that Marguerite and her husband must often have been on bad terms and informally parted, even before the legal separation.⁶ The bitter rancor against her husband and his sister that is evident in her works, particularly in Les Angoysses, suggests that publication must have occurred while she was away from him. For there are so many clues in the text to the identity of the pseudonymous heroine (including anagrams such as Icuoc for Coucy, Eliveba for Abbeville, Hennerc for Crenne) that family and friends could hardly have doubted how to read this roman à clef. Indeed, Les Angoysses places the first definitive break between the spouses at the point where a servant betrays Hélisenne by revealing her secret diary to her long suspicious husband. Nonetheless, there may have been efforts at reconciliation: in 1550 both Fournel and “damoiselle Marguerite de Briet sa femme” are the losers in a court case they had with a Parisian baker over money they owed him. Two years later, as the grant mentioned above makes clear, she was living on her own and able to reward one Christophe Le Manyer rather handsomely for unspecified “good and agreeable services.”

Hélisenne/Marguerite's literary success during these years, as shown by the rapid succession of editions, was a source of considerable satisfaction for her (see the “Fourth Invective Letter” …). Certain of the reasons for her popularity may be easily discerned: to begin with, Les Angoysses was the first novel of passion in French in the fashionable manner of Boccaccio and Juan de Flores. A public that enjoyed these authors' works in translation was already prepared to savor a French example of the genre.

By its tone and content, furthermore, Hélisenne's story renewed an older tradition long favored in France, the tragic love tale familiar from prose romances (much in vogue in the sixteenth century), contes, and poetry. The love complaint, on which Boccaccio also drew in writing the story of Fiammetta (in French, Flammette), appeared often in poetry that Marguerite Briet would probably have known, from Petrarch to Clément Marot and Maurice Scève. It furnishes the central, unifying theme in Jean Bouchet's book of poetry L'Amoureux transi sans espoir (1500) (The Bashful, Hopeless Lover) and Anthoine Prevost's romance in verse L'Amant desconforté (1530) (The Discomfited Lover). When the Elegia di madonna Fiammetta came out in French in 1532, its anonymous translator gave it the title Complainte des tristes amours de Flammette à son amy Pamphile (The Complaint of the Sad Loves of Flammette to Her Friend Pamphile).

Such predecessors provided models for Hélisenne when she decided to write her painful account, even though her own experiences required her to make many changes in plot and characterization and symbolic significance of the love story. Her real-life passion did not altogether fit the mold provided by fictional heroines, nor was her sorrow the same as that expressed by male lover-poets in their works. There are significant parallels, however, not entirely fortuitous, with a woman whose work Marguerite may not have known directly, but whose influence colored sixteenth-century debate over women's roles: Christine de Pizan.⁷ I am not thinking here of Christine's poems about her own life with her beloved husband, but rather of her portrayal of extramarital love as a trap which women should avoid if they value freedom and honor, and especially of the way she views the situation of the lady vis-à-vis the courtly lover: if the lady does not yield to her importunate lover she will lose him, yet if she does yield to him she loses her self-esteem and still loses his love in the end. Hélisenne/Marguerite seems to have been well aware of this no-win aspect of woman's position in the love triangle of lover, lady, and society. It is not so much her conventional morality or respect for social rules—despite Richard Berrong's thoughtful analysis of this side of her personality⁸—that makes Marguerite equate lovelessness with liberty and love with lack of reason, but rather her acute feeling that there is no sure way out of her dilemma except death or renunciation.

Through her writing Marguerite experiments with both of these alternatives (the latter especially in the conclusion to Le Songe), as well as searching for other solutions. In the process she enters the on-going debate on love and the proper relations between the sexes so essential to French thought at the time. After the ambiguous condemnation of her lover in part 1 of Les Angoysses, parts 2 and 3 may be seen as her effort to elevate Guenelic and initiate him into the mysteries of Platonic love, in preparation for his mystical union with the dying Hélisenne. She finds a piquant if somewhat awkward way to recount her death as Hélisenne: writing as Guenelic, she narrates his eventual return to her side and her death in his arms, followed by his own grieving death, as recounted by their mutual friend Quezinstra.

The wish fulfillment quality of this episode, its operatic tone, shows in the archetypal details—a hermit's funereal predictions, a forest setting, Hélisenne's lengthy dying speech to her repentant ami, his subsequent fit of melancholy, Quezinstra's “melliflues paroles” about fate, free will, and the lovers' sad ends. We as readers are listening to a Medieval romance or a libretto for Monteverdi, and the transparently fictive nature of this death keeps us from being surprised that Marguerite continued to publish as Hélisenne for years after the appearance of her death scene in print. Demats suggests that only through her imagined death could Marguerite reconcile literature and life, her idealized view of what love should be with her actual experience of what it had been.⁹ There is serious question as to how satisfactory this bizarre solution proved to be, for her and her readers alike, but its very melodramatic exaggeration and the ornate language she uses to tell about it are important factors in the early success of the book.

To sum up, the popularity of Les Angoysses was based on fashion (in genre, style, and sentiment), tradition (in theme and denouement), and, the third indispensable factor, reflection—the combination of introspection and observation that led Hélisenne to personalize her story, to examine with a critical eye both society's expectations and lovers' aspirations. Her critique is not as thoroughgoing as twentieth-century feminists might like, and she often gets tangled up in inconsistencies and contradictions, yet the attempt she makes is still intriguing, and we must admire the courage (along with a desire for revenge and a taste for notoriety!) that led her to bring her case as wronged wife and unhappy mistress before the jury of her peers, the lady readers to whom she dedicates her work.

A.-M. Schmidt attributes both the succès de sentiment and the succès de scandale of her book to her boldness in daring to derive a novel from her personal marital misfortunes.¹⁰ We are touched as well as scandalized by her candor. Demats adds that the most important element in Hélisenne's achievement is her ability to use literature for her own purposes—to serve her resentments and her intimate hopes and, most of all, to savor the bitter pleasure of reliving and completing the drama of her love affair.¹¹ The unique “irritating charm” that many readers find in Les Angoysses springs from a weakness that becomes a strength, a confession that becomes an accusation. And from a voyeurism that we are invited to share: Hélisenne's husband's vigilant jealousy—in her letters she calls him Argus, after the hundred-eyed giant of Greek mythology—is a motivating force to equal her own obsession. The lover himself, without quite being reduced to a Bel Indifférent, is less significant than the desire he arouses. We might almost call him a sex object in the modern sense of the term, were it not for Hélisenne's repeated attempts to invest their experience with transcendent meaning.

The conventional goal Marguerite sets for her work—to exhort others not to follow folle Amour, that is, Mad Love—should not be considered pure hypocrisy. It is true that the tellers of tales of doubtful morality traditionally claim to be moralists, yet in creating Hélisenne she is indeed presenting us with a cautionary fable, whatever else she is doing at the same time. For the effect on the reader of this woman's story of suffering differs in kind from that of more glamorous figures like Guinevere, Francesca da Rimini, or Juliet: we are moved to question the validity of romantic love as an intellectual concept and as a life-enhancing experience, even if we secretly envy the intensity of Hélisenne's desires. The unglamorous aspect of her obsession is not concealed by silence, nor is it as a rule transfigured by lyric beauty. Whereas many readers of Petrarch's or Louise Labé's poems would gladly embrace their pains if the poetry came with it, Hélisenne's literary skill is sufficient to serve her story but not to overwhelm it.

We cannot justly conclude, however, that Marguerite's writing questions courtly love simply because she lacks the literary power to create her own Vita Nuova. It might be fairer as well as more useful to see her concern with truth and illusion, appearance and reality, as deriving from an awareness of the décalage, the split, which frequently occurs between what she has read and what she has seen—a break that she sometimes explores and sometimes obscures. Her text oscillates between the petty and the poetic—and one irony is that she often writes best, with the most convincing vision and eloquence, when she is least involved with being eloquent.

Another, less expected irony is present as well: many a telling detail, many a gesture or image that strikes a twentieth-century reader as especially colorful or realistic can be traced to one of the stories she took as models. What she has read influences what she sees as well as what she says. Often it is impossible to tell whether a particular incident is based on her life or her model or both, so much do the literary and the literal intertwine. Does her first glimpse of Guenelic follow the pattern of Fiammetta's initial encounter with Pamfilo because Marguerite is adapting her account to her memory of Boccaccio's story, or did that memory perhaps lead her to experience the actual encounter in those terms? Such a question, though unanswerable, is worth posing: it reminds us to keep an eye out for both convergence and divergence when we compare Hélisenne's narrative with preceding ones. Her originality arises from a combination of imitation and innovation.

The convoluted high style that Marguerite prefers for certain episodes has its own irritating charm; even in her day critics disagreed about its worth. Hélisenne did not invent the rhetorical extravagance she calls the delectable stile poeticque—her schoolmasters are Jean Lemaire de Belges, Jacobo Caviceo, and Diego de San Pedro, among others—but she has been both praised and blamed for using it. In 1555 François de Billon published a book in defense of women called Le Fort inexpugnable de l'honneur du sexe féminin; one feature of his “fortress” is a listing of notable female authors. While not at the top of the list, Hélisenne figures there in an honorable position: “After that noble city of Lyon, Picardie receives no little honor from its daughter Hélisenne. Her compositions are so often in the hands of those French who delight in [se delectans de] prose that there is no need to say more about it.”¹² Not everyone found her equally delightful.

Claude Colet, in his prefatory letter to the 1550 edition of Hélisenne's collected works, recalls a conversation with the two “gracieuses Damoyselles” who asked him to take on the project.¹³ The ladies were discussing with him the merits of various authors, and they included several vertueuses Dames among the French writers, putting in first place, naturally enough, “la tresillustre et incomparable Marguerite de France.” Hélisenne de Crenne was then mentioned. Her Angoysses and other works were too hard for the demoiselles to understand because there were so many obscure Latinate words in them; they asked the scholar to revise the texts for them and translate the rare words into more familiar terms. It is interesting to note that Colet expresses no qualms about the content of the books. Hélisenne's subject matter, especially in Le Songe, is “bien belle et d'edification à toutes gens qui ayment la Vertu” (“very beautiful and edifying to all who love Virtue”), but he is hesitant to redo the texts of a living author whose style may be deliberately chosen, he says, to be understood only by the learned. Nonetheless he is soon convinced that he should undertake the task, since the young ladies promise to arrange matters with Hélisenne for him. The 1551 edition of Hélisenne's Oeuvres carries the notation that it was revised by the author herself; this claim is probably incorrect, but Marguerite may well have given her permission to Colet to do the revisions for her.

Colet's insistence that Hélisenne's intentions in writing are “good, holy and praiseworthy if well understood” strikes a modern reader as rather disingenuous—but he had never heard of Freud, after all, and even the Calvinists of the day believed in the value of the cautionary tale. One of Hélisenne's own constant concerns is to present her story as edifying and herself as more victim than villainess. Amour excessif and reason or respectability battle for her psyche as, in religious terms, sin and salvation war for her soul. The latter conflict matters much less to her than the former: she fears social damnation more than spiritual. The same concern is shown in her Familiar and Invective Letters, when she allows her husband to accuse her of feigning virtue in order to avoid being “expelled from the society of ladies.” And the advice she gives in her “familiar letters” is almost always designed to show herself as a paragon of piety, filial devotion, and marital fidelity.¹⁴ Much of her curious appeal comes from this juxtaposition of cant and sincerity, her open revelation of her occasional duplicity—like a female Rousseau avant la lettre, she seems to expect us to forgive her because she has so frankly admitted her failings.

Her confession nonetheless failed to impress favorably some of her contemporaries, in style or content.¹⁵ The humanist Étienne Pasquier mistakenly believed that Rabelais had her in mind when the great satirist ridiculed the Latin jargon of the écolier Limousin, and Pasquier's error has inspired numerous pages of futile scholarly commentary over the years. Bernier's uncomplimentary assessment, however, has a certain truth to its sting: in his opinion “Elizaine de Crene, a Picarde, wrote various very extravagant works.” Pasquier, Bernier, and Colet all seem to think that Hélisenne's text is verbose and pretentiously pedantic, that her “redundance latinicome” is too much for readers to endure. Before passing judgment on her style, however, let us examine it in more detail.

Both Demats and Secor have analyzed the differences between the original and the revised versions of Les Angoysses.¹⁶ Their conclusions are similar: the newer edition simplifies the language of the text, not only replacing a number of Old French words (such as curre, engin) with more modern terms, but also and especially—as the young ladies had wished—substituting synonyms in common use for much of Hélisenne's erudite Latinate vocabulary. A few of these latter terms are neologisms, either invented by Hélisenne or borrowed from fellow authors of the time. Secor gives several examples of words unattested before Hélisenne: jubarité (joy), letification (enjoyment), and tediation (irritation, boredom, or fatigue).

Most of her learned language, however, is drawn from the traditional vocabulary of Medieval schools and courts, words she had learned from the works of the fifteenth-century poets known as the Grands Rhétoriqueurs as well as from treatises by early humanists and authors of manuals on writing.¹⁷ These words were current in scholarly circles when Hélisenne began to write; they may never have been widely known among the laity, particularly among those French who knew how to read in the vernacular but had little or no training in Latin. When Hélisenne employs a rare Latinate word, she often pairs it with a homelier term, easily understood by every reader—such as “joye et hilarité” (joy and jubilation), “exoculé ny aveuglé” (neither exoculated nor blinded), “scelerité et maulvaistié” (evil and wickedness). This doubling of synonyms from different registers is a stylistic trait frequently found in the French “high style” from the twelfth or thirteenth century on, but Hélisenne is perhaps excessively fond of the technique. She sometimes extends the list of synonyms to three, four, even five terms of varying degrees of familiarity.

Given the choice between a common and a learned term, Hélisenne prefers the learned: for “high-thundering” she uses “altitonant” rather than the ordinary “hault tonant”; for Creator she likes to use “Plasmateur.” Her tendency to go to extremes leads her at times to replace a fairly simple phrase in one of her sources with a string of abstruse words that shows off her own learning and seems designed to impress (and more, to intimidate?) her principal readers—the ladies and gentlemen of the gentry.¹⁸ Thus, in a description of the deeds of Hercules drawn from Le Grand Olympe she transforms “surmonté (tamed, has overcome) Cerberus, chien à trois testes (dog with three heads)” into “suppedité Cerberus, le chien tricipite,” where the basic meaning is unchanged but the tone is rendered perceptibly more abstract and difficult.

Some of Hélisenne's excesses may be attributed to the Renaissance spirit—like Rabelais or Marot she is intoxicated by the joys of sheer verbalization—and her desire to demonstrate her knowledge has many parallels among the poets and humanist scholars of the period. Like Maurice Scève, too, Hélisenne treasures the recondite term in itself, as if words were jewels. Hence her pleasure in using ociosité (“idleness,” related to “otiose”), caligineux (“caliginous, dark”), scaturie (“source”), aurigateur (“charioteer”), and other arcane words.

When Hélisenne began to compose Les Angoysses, literary discourse in France used Middle French, a specialized language or, in J. P. Houston's terms, a “stylistic complex … made of erudite vocabulary, complicated sentence structure, and varied forms, now medieval, now modern.”¹⁹ Hélisenne and her contemporaries wrote—with their individual variations—in Middle French's typical prose style, as had such respected predecessors as Christine de Pizan and Alain Chartier. This ceremonial, intricate, Latinizing eloquence, with paragraphs made up of long sentences arranged into short chapters like traditional philosophical treatises, with an emphasis on analysis and legal or scholastic terminology, yet full of striking images, conforms to the humanist ideal of the late Medieval and early Renaissance authors. It is a type of poetic prose René Sturel finds characteristic of the sixteenth century.²⁰

Many of Hélisenne's readers must have enjoyed this fancy writing as much as she did, judging by the laudatory comments of François de Billon and the Abbeville chronicler cited above, as well as by the frequent republication of her words. Even Colet, in his revisions, spares many words and phrases that belong, he says, to the poetic style. So why was Hélisenne singled out for criticism by Pasquier and other similarly minded men?

Many modern scholars assert that she carries the verbal extravagance too far, indulges too much in “the bombast of amorous anguish,” is too diffuse, confused, contradictory, repetitious, and uneven.²¹ Thus they concur with the harsher critics of her day. Yet, if we carefully compare her prose with the writing of her peers, we find that she writes as well or better than many others. The occasional awkwardness and obscurity of her writing, the magpie fondness for rare words and rhetorical razzle-dazzle, the danger of getting lost in a maze of tangled or at least deeply embedded clauses—all of these seeming faults (familiar also in her contemporaries) are in Hélisenne's case redeemed and often transformed by the intensity of her expressed feeling and the close attention to changing mental and emotional states. Perhaps she gets into trouble because she is a woman writing with a unique combination of passion, erudition, and deliberate confrontation; because she is a well-schooled and frankly partisan champion of women's rights; because she openly expresses her desire for a fulfilled intellectual and erotic life.

Christine de Pizan's learned challenge to the male order is less explosive, defused by her stress on traditional female virtues like chastity and marital fidelity, as by the coolly dispassionate tone that characterizes much of her writing. Pernette du Guillet is herself both passionate and erudite, but her poetry, published only after her death, asserts her transcendence of the physical and poses little challenge to patriarchal society. Louise Labé comes closer to Hélisenne's position, but La Belle Cordelière, as her friends in Lyon called her, considers herself a special case, like the legendary heroine Bradamanta, not so much an advocate for all women's rights. Her vocabulary is also, in the main, simpler, less florid, less provocatively scholastic than Hélisenne's.

Hélisenne's conscious, even conspicuous, display of learning in a work of popular appeal directed (at least in large part) to a readership of women (who were usually less schooled than she) appears to have disconcerted a number of men and women, but for different reasons. The demoiselles who ask Colet's help do not so much criticize Hélisenne's style as they express genuine regret at not being able to understand it. Colet and other detractors show no inability to comprehend Hélisenne's texts—they simply dislike her use of Latinisms and archaic terms on aesthetic or misogynistic grounds. I speculate that, as these same learned men did not criticize their brother writers so severely for similar stylistic features, their anger may have largely sprung from consternation that a mere woman would so aggressively display her arcane learning. What would pass unnoticed in the work of Jean Lemaire de Belges is considered unforgivable in her texts. Perhaps the highly charged and personal nature of much of her writing further exasperated her male readers, especially what we would call today her emerging feminist consciousness.

Hélisenne herself seems to have feared a severe reception of her works, at least in certain quarters, and defends her content and style on several occasions, most notably in the “Fourth Invective Letter” and in the final chapter of part 1 of Les Angoysses, a letter addressed to her lady readers. In the latter instance she first of all counters the opinion of “certain timid ladies” that “immodest love” should be passed over in silence, then expresses her assurance that all ladies who read her book will forgive her candor: “If you know well with what force Love has constrained me, I will be blamed by none [feminine plural].” Her book, she asserts (as ever), will help others avoid the same failings she describes. Then, Hélisenne touches on her style and the book's reception: “I am quite sure that this little work of mine will seem crude and obscure in comparison to those you may have read, composed by orators and historians, who by the sublimity of their intellect write books no less jocund than difficult and arduous; but in this it must serve me as an excuse that our feminine nature is not as apt for learning as men naturally are.” She completes her modesty formula by stating that she is not even so presumptuous as to believe herself capable of equaling, much less bettering, the literary achievements of certain unnamed ladies—those who are gifted with such lofty minds that their compositions are most elegant in language. But whatever faults there are in her writing, she says, must be due to defects in her knowledge and not in her will, aspiration, and desire.

This lengthy apology, in which she eschews rivalry not only with learned men but also with other talented women, is an especially insistent development of a traditional opening or closing theme, the author's humble plea for the reader's benevolence. It shows the curious mixture of self-assurance and self-doubt we find elsewhere in her writing, intensified at the moment by her awareness of risking criticism by the publication of her “little work.” A learned woman was considered a fascinating anomaly by the men and women of the Renaissance and had to contend with possible attacks from her own sex as well as from the opposite sex. It was quite rare for women of the Middle Ages and Renaissance to be both wives and scholars (though this combination was somewhat more likely to occur in France than elsewhere): Margaret King has analyzed the situation of learned women in Renaissance Italy and found that they were forced to choose “marriage and full participation in social life [relinquishing their studies] … or abstention from marriage and withdrawal from the world.”²² Even a circumscribed life of chastity could not disarm all of their critics, and such celebrated women humanists as Costanza Varano, Cassandra Fedele, and Isotta Nogarola feel that they must apologize for being women with pretensions to learning—and sometimes for being women at all. Male humanists, on the other hand, praise these women lavishly or else condemn them bitterly. One anonymous pamphleteer, writing in Latin, goes so far as to assert that “an eloquent woman is never chaste; and the behavior of many learned women also confirms [this] truth.”²³ Hélisenne must have encountered many men with attitudes like this Italian's, many who attacked her ability and her integrity. Such opposition seems to have first spurred her to further writing, in her letters and Le Songe, in order to defend herself and to express the views of a woman who could speak with unusual authority in both emotional and intellectual domains. It may also explain the relative brevity of her publishing career and the repeated denials that she ever reached the “fifth and ultimate degree” of love in her relationship with Guenelic. She may have decided that the public notice she once craved had begun to cost too much.

The male establishment's verdict on her is summed up by Bernier: she was a “precieuse et sçavante que son sçavoir avoit rendue folle,” that is, a “precious” or overly refined woman whose learning had made her mad.²⁴ A century before Molière's satires against Les Précieuses ridicules and Les Femmes savantes, censorious male critics were mocking women who had a strong sense of self and refused to let men have all the words. Hélisenne herself never ceases to identify learning with sanity and self-worth; implicitly rejecting Bernier's condescending sarcasms, she finds her folly in love, not learning.

Les Angoysses, as the first native novel of passion in France, had many imitators. It points the way toward L'Astrée, the elegant pastoral novel so popular at the end of the sixteenth century, and Madame de Lafayette's classic psychological novel, La Princesse de Clèves, in the seventeenth century. Several scholars have found suggestive parallels between Les Angoysses and La Princesse, though there is no proof that Madame de Lafayette knew the work of her predecessor (she was familiar with the contes of Marguerite of Navarre).

The general reading public seems to have forgotten Hélisenne after the sixteenth century, and the scholars themselves reduced her to a hoax or a legend: La Monnoye, summing up the opinions of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century scholarship, says that she never existed, that her romanesque name conceals some capricious author—in that he is correct!—who wrote a wholly made-up story in over-Latinate language.²⁵ Apart from what Demats calls the “astonishing divagations” of misguided Rabelais specialists, the most intriguing development in early Hélisenne studies is the appearance in the nineteenth century of a romanticized biography by Hyacinthe Dusevel: he relies on vague reminiscences and active imaginations discovered in Hélisenne's home region of Picardy, where her memory seems to have survived into the eighteenth century, to elaborate a tale of Hélisenne's reception at court by Louise of Savoy.²⁶ There, according to Dusevel, Hélisenne meets a handsome young knight whose death inspires her novel. Dusevel adds that the ladies of the gallant and frivolous court of François Premier never read Les Angoysses without shedding tears.

Along with such charming, though undocumented, romantic fantasies, the nineteenth century sees a rebirth of serious interest in the historical Hélisenne and an effort to place her achievements in context. In 1840, in the first significant scholarly study of her writing, J. M. Guichard sees Hélisenne as the link between Christine de Pizan in the fourteenth century and Madame de Staël in the eighteenth. The author of Les Angoysses deserves to take her place among “the courageous and inspired women, worthy of our respect, who have in every era given luster to French literature.”²⁷ Guichard appreciates the poetry and drama of Hélisenne's account of her violent and disordered passion. He sees her as the most complete practitioner of the intimate novel.

At the turn of the twentieth century several scholars, most notably Gustave Reynier and Henriette Charasson, begin to trace Hélisenne's role as creator of the sentimental novel or novel of passion, as well as her contribution to the development of modern psychology and the literary analysis of feelings.²⁸ In 1929 L. M. Richardson, in The Forerunners of Feminism in French Literature of the Renaissance from Christine de Pisan to Marie de Gournay, accords an honorable place to Hélisenne.²⁹ Richardson takes special note of Hélisenne's Familiar and Invective Letters and considers her the only Frenchwoman to champion her sex in the early sixteenth century. These concerns will predominate in subsequent scholarship, along with an increasing interest in her style and the exciting rediscovery of the historical Marguerite Briet behind Hélisenne de Crenne.

In recent years Hélisenne has benefited from the new vogue of the Renaissance among many scholars and general readers, as from the continuing growth of feminist criticism, with its reassessing of the literary canon. Since the 1950s there have been at least five doctoral dissertations devoted to her work, a dozen or more articles and other studies treating her books, and a series of new editions. Part 1 of Les Angoysses has attracted the most attention, with two critical editions published in France, but there is also Secor's critical edition of the whole novel (available from University Microfilms) and a Slatkine reprint of the 1551 complete Oeuvres, as well as the translation of her letters by Mustacchi and Archambault.

In choosing selections to translate for this volume I have favored part 1, the most famous and most striking example of her writing, and within part 1 itself I thought best to concentrate on the initial half-dozen chapters, as they recount her early life and the beginnings of her tragic love affair. Almost all of Hélisenne's key themes and concerns are introduced in these six chapters, and the obsessive quality of her passion is already made abundantly clear, as are the reactions of her husband and her new love interest to her predicament. While it is painful to have to omit some wonderful episodes that occur later in the story, the summary that I provide of the rest of the novel should give a quick overview of the text as a whole and place the excerpted chapters in context. I have also translated the prefatory poem “Hélisenne aux Lisantes” (“Hélisenne to Her Lady Readers”), the only verse we have by her—which is interesting both as a succinct statement of her views and as a proof of her skill at handling the fashionable dizain or ten-line form, plus the dedicatory letter she addresses to “all honorable ladies,” setting forth in more detail her intentions in composing her book. In addition to these selections from Les Angoysses I have translated major portions of the “Fourth Invective Letter” from Hélisenne's collected letters, an essay in epistolary form in which she offers a spirited defense of women's right to write literature. This essay is one of a series in which she attacks the misogynistic attitudes shown by, among others, her husband and a self-appointed censor named Elenot. It is to Elenot, at least ostensibly, that she writes the “Fourth Letter,” though the text makes clear that she expects a wider audience as well. The letter reiterates many of the concerns of Les Angoysses in a different framework and allows us to see a new dimension of Hélisenne's role as champion of women's causes.

In all the passages I have translated I have sought to preserve as much as possible of the period flavor of Hélisenne's style, without trying to outdo John Lyly's Euphues. Where feasible I have used words of the same or similar registers as the originals, that is, words of the same level and category, from concrete to abstract, familiar to abstruse, simple to complex. I have also reproduced, in many cases, the loose, meandering construction she uses in most of her sentences, for I believe its very diffuseness is an essential aspect of her thought patterns. Where she is not systematic, I have not tried to regularize her—thus, for example, as she refers to the classical gods sometimes by their Greek names, sometimes by the Roman equivalents, and elsewhere merely by an allusion to a myth about them, so does my translation. I have added a word in brackets or a note to the translation where needed for comprehension, but I did not want to otherwise disturb the guessing game she likes to play with her readers. I have, however, abbreviated the text in a few places where her tendency to diffuseness and repetition seemed likely to tire a modern reader—though I have certainly left in enough repetition to give a good idea of that element of her style! It is in part by the recurrence of phrases such as “a singular pleasure,” “shameless glances,” “true possessor of my heart,” or “amorous folly” that her story gains its enigmatic power. The repetition of terms, images, and situations, together with the frequent lists of synonyms, translates the lady's obsession and her unending but largely fruitless efforts to deal with it.

Les Angoysses douloureuses is a long and elaborate novel, though not so long or complicated as some of the chivalric romances popular in Hélisenne's day. Demats's edition of part 1 alone runs nearly one hundred pages, while Secor's edition of the whole text in his dissertation takes more than four hundred typed pages. The three parts are roughly equivalent in size, with part 2 somewhat longer than part 1, and part 3 somewhat shorter. They vary considerably, however, in focus, and there is evidence in the text that the three sections were written and may well have been published or at least circulated in manuscript separately (though no such partial editions have been found).

The dedicatory epistle or letter that precedes part 1 is paralleled by similar prefaces within the other two parts—another letter in part 2 and a preamble in part 3. While the three prefaces share many themes, they differ in tone and even intended audience, shifting from an exclusively female to a male or mixed audience. The character of Guenelic also alters for the better, as we have said, and Hélisenne even reminds the readers in part 2 of episodes in part 1, so that she can reinterpret them in less disparaging ways. Scholars speculate as to why she did not go back and change the earlier version, whatever her composition methods, before the novel was published in full form. It might be that this repetition with variation allowed her to have her literary cake and eat it too—she presents both views and leaves it up to us to make sense of them.

Part 1 has twenty-eight chapters, more than either of the others, but its chapters are usually briefer; several are only one or two pages long and treat a single episode. In tone part 1 often resembles a diary or journal—this intimacy is largely lost in the later, less autobiographical sections, yet they too offer fresh insights into Hélisenne's ideas and interests, as filtered through her male narrators. Part 2, chapter 12, “The state and liberality of a reigning princess,” is especially intriguing in this regard. It has a double purpose, to portray Hélisenne's ideal female monarch and to pay a playfully exaggerated compliment to her relative Jeanne Briet.³⁰ The “very beautiful city” of Eliveba where the magnificent princess holds her court is none other than Hélisenne's own beloved Abbeville, transported by the author into exotic Asia Minor, near Troy. The mock-heroic tone that frequently colors the tales of chivalric derring-do in parts 2 and 3 sets Les Angoysses off from its conventional models and tempers our reading of Guenelic's slow evolution from selfish boy to perfect lover.

Hélisenne's ironies and sly mockeries do not keep her, nonetheless, from showing a genuine interest in Neoplatonism and Stoicism and the potential these philosophies might have for resolving the conflicts between appearance and reality, reason and sensuality, law and liberty, that trouble her. Throughout Les Angoysses she vacillates between two idealized self-images, Hélisenne the inamorata and Hélisenne the lady of honor and wisdom. In part 3 she manages to fuse them into a single, splendid, if equivocal, image in her death scene. It is the crowning irony of the work that Quezinstra, perfect knight and ideal friend, who consistently urges Guenelic to renounce his immoderate desires, becomes a hermit near the lovers' tomb. Thus he finally honors them as saints, martyrs to the very love he has disdained. And the apotheosis of Hélisenne's “little book,” which both Pallas Athena and Venus wish to claim, asserts the enduring value of her work in an amusing fashion. Demats points out that her book serves as a new apple of discord similar to the one that led to the Trojan War.³¹ Here the outcome is peaceful—the publication of Hélisenne's book, by Jupiter's order, in Paris, the city favored by both goddesses.

Les Angoysses begins with the prefatory poem and letter already mentioned. In part 1 Hélisenne tells the story of her life and all the suffering she has endured for Guenelic. Chapter 1 recounts her noble birth, childhood, and the early years of her marriage. Chapters 2-6 show her sudden surprise by love, her young suitor's attentions, and her husband's growing jealousy. Chapters 7-10 tell of the first exchanges of words and then letters between the lovers. Hélisenne advises Guenelic to give up his dangerous passion, yet she also encourages him. In chapter 11 her husband discovers and reads the love letters (she has kept a copy of her own missive). In fury he slaps her and orders her to remain in her chamber. Later, when Hélisenne once more gazes too ardently at Guenelic in church, her husband beats her brutally as soon as they return home. In chapter 12 Hélisenne tries unsuccessfully to kill herself with a knife. Chapters 13-15 recount her reluctant visit to a monk and the preacher's failure to reform her. As these chapter headings show, the result is a foregone conclusion: “Holy admonitions do not make a woman stung by love wish to desist,” “The heart of a woman obstinate in love is impossible to change.” Chapters 16-18 tell of the strategems the lovers employ to arrange meetings, their “amorous colloquies,” and the husband's continuing abuse of his rebellious wife. Chapters 19-20 center on the lover's reproaches—he is angry that Hélisenne has not rewarded his love service. She calls him by name for the first time and finally admits to him that she would like to gratify his desire. Yet concern for her reputation and doubts of his constancy deter her. He grows more and more insolent and demanding. She dreams of his embraces, but the dream turns into a nightmare. Chapters 21-22 deal with gossip, Hélisenne's declining health, and her “piteous exclamation” against Guenelic and the love from which she cannot free herself. A servant informs her husband that Hélisenne has written down an account of her love affair. In a rage the husband kicks down the door to her room, reads the tale of her (in his words) “unbridled lasciviousness,” and decides to kill her before she can consummate her sinful desires and dishonor them both. But the servants intervene. He decides to send her away instead. Chapters 23-27 describe her sad departure, her regrets, her imprisonment in a tower with only two demoiselles for company, and her bittersweet reflections on her fate. The last chapter of part 1 is a final plea for understanding from the “very dear and honored ladies” who will read her book. She excuses herself for speaking without reserve and defends her style as well as her subject matter, closing with a prayer that God will grant the ladies all the virtues necessary to live free of inconvenient passions.

Part 2 recounts the adventures of Guenelic and Quezinstra searching for Hélisenne. Her introductory letter asserts two goals, to warn young men of the perils of passion and to stimulate them to knightly deeds. In chapters 1-2 Guenelic himself says he wishes to teach other young men the virtues of true love, and admits his own past indiscretions, before retelling the story of the love affair from his point of view, emphasizing his anguishes. Hélisenne seems to invite us to enjoy the spectacle of Guenelic's suffering—as a fitting counterpart to her own miseries—even as we are expected to sympathize with him. In chapter 3, having learned that Hélisenne has been imprisoned, but not where, he leaves with Quezinstra to find and rescue her. The two young men pretend to be going on a pilgrimage—throughout parts 2 and 3 Guenelic will show a discretion as extreme as his earlier indiscretions. The two friends encounter and defeat brigands on their way to Sirap (Paris), where they spend some time, in chapter 4, before a visit to Gorenflos, the rich duchy that is Hélisenne's fantasy version of a family property with the same name. The next chapters describe the travelers' experiences in Gorenflos: long discussions about love, a terrifying dream in which Guenelic sees Hélisenne dying, a consultation with an astrologer who predicts that Guenelic will see her again in two years, the knighting of the two companions, a series of tournaments where Quezinstra in particular shines (and outshines Guenelic), and, in chapter 11, an aristocratic wedding ceremony they witness that intensifies Guenelic's longing for his lady love. After a rapid tour of the Mediterranean in which they visit the island of Cythera, North Africa, Cyprus, Syria, and other famous spots, most notably Troy, they arrive in Eliveba.

Chapters 12-14 tell of the princess of Eliveba, her elegant court, and the besieging of her city by a suitor whose proposal of marriage she has rejected. As we might expect, both young visitors take her side in the ensuing war, and once again Quezinstra's prowess is extraordinary—he eventually wins a single combat that decides the conflict. Guenelic, meanwhile, is brave but unlucky—captured in battle he narrowly escapes death. In chapter 15 the two companion knights receive the grateful princess's gifts and depart on a new round of visits, to Rhodes, Athens, Thebes, and other distant localities. They assist a prince in putting down a rebellion among his subjects. Though he would like to keep them at his court they insist on leaving—to the prince's admonitions against love Guenelic responds with praise of loyal love service.

Part 3, chapters 1-2, continues their voyages and eventually brings them to Italy, where Guenelic falls ill but recovers. They visit a hermit who advises them to resist sensuality. Guenelic maintains that love makes us virtuous (here Hélisenne repeats at length the well-known doctrine of courtly love that the true lover is ennobled by his love and thus avoids all the deadly sins).³² The hermit predicts that Guenelic will find his lady, yet will not have the good fortune to enjoy her love in peace. In chapter 3 Guenelic at last discovers her whereabouts, and chapters 4-7 describe his efforts to contact Hélisenne, the lovers' nocturnal conversation through a barred window of her tower, and the plan for her escape that she devises and the two young men carry out—with disastrous results, for Hélisenne is soon struck with a mysterious and fatal malady. Before leaving the castle, however, she has had the satisfaction of sending word to her husband that, if he wants a wife, he should get himself one (since she is his no longer). Chapters 8-12 present a lovingly detailed account of Hélisenne's repentance, her final advice to her lover to purify his passion of all carnal taint and prepare for the reunion of their souls in the next world, her death, Guenelic's grief and his death, and the appearance of the god Mercury who not only conducts the lovers' souls to Minos (who sends them to the Elysian Fields) but takes Quezinstra on a guided tour of the infernal regions. With a touch of malice Hélisenne has Mercury specify that Venus is sending one of the Furies to torment the cruel sister-in-law who had been her jailer. Quezinstra arranges honorable burial for the lovers' bodies and has written on their tombs their sad history, then builds a small chapel and a hermitage nearby, where he will finish out his days in solitude. Mercury carries to heaven the small white-silk package containing Hélisenne's book—there Venus and Pallas Athena dispute possession of the book, until Jupiter sends it down to Paris to be published and thereby perpetuate the memory of these two and their amorous anguishes.

Les Angoysses was indeed published in Paris, as Jupiter and Hélisenne wished, and it has secured her—despite periods of eclipse—a place in literature, the perpetual memory of humanity, as she so ardently desired. Together with her letters, Le Songe, and the translation from the Aeneid, Les Angoysses preserves the record of a lively energetic, and amazingly determined woman whose voice reaches us clearly across the centuries. Her work has for us the double appeal of gossip and philosophy, diary and poetry, autobiographical realism in emotion, gesture, and concrete detail along with bold theorizing on morality and the nature of women and men. Often conventional or even conservative, yet equally often avant-garde, passionate in her loving and her learning, advocate of more fulfilled lives for all women, starting with herself, Hélisenne is a woman of the Renaissance who speaks powerfully to our times.

Notes

1. Helen Waldstein, “Hélisenne de Crenne: A Woman of the Renaissance”; Suzanne Marie-Marguerite Loriente, “L'Esthétique des Angoysses Douloureuses Qui Procedent d'Amours d'Hélisenne de Crenne.”

2. Paule Demats, ed., Les Angoysses douloureuses qui procedent d'amours (1538), p. xxxvi.

3. Louis Loviot, “Hélisenne de Crenne”; Abel Lefranc, “A propos d'Hélisenne de Crenne”; V.-L. Saulnier, “Quelques nouveautés sur Hélisenne de Crenne.”

4. Demats, ed., p. viii.

5. Ibid., p. x.

6. Saulnier, p. 461, n. 1.

7. On Christine de Pizan's attitudes to courtly love, see Liliane Dulac, “Christine de Pisan et le Malheur des Vrais Amans”; Charity Cannon Willard, “A New Look at Christine de Pizan's Epistre au Dieu d'Amours”; and Willard, Christine de Pizan: Her Life and Works, pp. 87-89, 150-53.

8. Richard M. Berrong, “Hélisenne de Crenne's Les Angoisses Douleureuses Qui Procèdent D'Amours.”

9. Demats, ed., p. xxxiii.

10. A.-M. Schmidt, in Histoire des Littératures, 3:201-2, cited in Demats, ed., p. xxxv.

11. Demats, ed., pp. xxxv-xxxvi.

12. François de Billon, Le fort inexpugnable de l'honneur du sexe féminin.

13. “Lettre de Claude Colet,” included in Hélisenne de Crenne's Oeuvres (Paris, 1550); reprinted in Demats, ed., pp. 102-3.

14. For a translation of Hélisenne's letters into colloquial English, plus an interesting analysis of the development of her ideas and writing style, see Marianna M. Mustacchi and Paul J. Archambault, trans. and eds., A Renaissance Woman: Hélisenne's Personal and Invective Letters.

15. Étienne Pasquier, Lettres; on Bernier, see Demats, ed., p. vi.

16. Harry R. Secor, Jr., ed., “Hélisenne de Crenne: Les Angoysses Douloureuses Qui Procedent D'Amours (1538): A Critical Edition Based on the Original Text with Introduction, Notes, and Glossary,” pp. c-cii; Demats, ed., p. xxxv.

17. John Porter Houston, The Traditions of French Prose Style: A Rhetorical Study, pp. 3-32, 34-44; Mustacchi, pp. 8-13.

18. On Hélisenne's use of Latinisms, see Secor, ed., pp. lxxx-lxxxiv, xc.

19. Houston, p. 3.

20. René Sturel, “La Prose poétique au XVIe siècle.”

21. See especially Houston, pp. 146-47.

22. Margaret L. King, “Book-Lined Cells: Women and Humanism in the Early Italian Renaissance.”

23. Ibid., p. 77.

24. Demats, ed., p. vi.

25. La Monnoye, cited by La Croix du Maine.

26. Hyacinthe Dusevel, Biographie des hommes célèbres du département de la Somme.

27. J.-M. Guichard, “Hélisenne de Crenne.”

28. Gustave Reynier, Le roman sentimental avant l'Astrée; Henriette Charasson, “Les origines de la sentimentalité moderne: d'Hélisenne de Crenne à Jean de Tinan.”

29. L. M. Richardson, The Forerunners of Feminism in French Literature of the Renaissance from Christine de Pisan to Marie de Gournay, pp. 75-76.

30. On Jeanne Briet, see Demats, ed., p. vii.

31. Ibid., p. xxiii.

32. Hélisenne borrows mainly from chapter 5 of Anthoine de La Sale's Petit Jehan de Saintré, in which the lady teaches Saintré “many good things and salutary doctrines, touching on how one should flee the seven deadly sins.” Compare Secor, ed., p. 459.

Bibliography

Primary Works

Crenne, Hélisenne de. Les Angoysses douloureuses qui procedent d'amours: Contenantz troys parties, Composees par Dame Hélisenne: Laquelle exhorte toutes personnes a ne suyvre folle Amour. Paris, 1538. Reprint, with the addition of “Hélisenne aux lisantes.” Lyon, 1539? Reprint of Lyon edition. Paris, 1541.

Demats, Paule, ed. Les Angoysses douloureuses qui procedent d'amours (1538), Première partie. Paris, 1968.

Mustacchi, Marianna M., and Paul J. Archambault, trans. and eds. A Renaissance Woman: Hélisenne's Personal and Invective Letters. Syracuse, New York, 1986.

Secor, Harry R., Jr., ed., “Hélisenne de Crenne: Les Angoysses Douloureuses Qui Procedent D'Amours (1538): A Critical Edition Based on the Original Text with Introduction, Notes, and Glossary.” Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1957.

Related Works

Berrong, Richard M. “Hélisenne de Crenne's Les Angoisses Douleureuses Qui Procèdent D'Amours: The Secularization of Reason.” The USF Language Quarterly 22, nos. 1-2 (Fall-Winter 1983): 20-22.

Billon, François de. Le fort inexpugnable de l'honneur du sexe feminin, folios 35b-36a. Paris, 1555.

Charasson, Henriette. “Les origines de la sentimentalité moderne: de Hélisenne de Crenne à Jean de Tinan.” Mercure de France 86 (1910), 193-216.

Coulet, Henri. Le roman jusqu'à la Révolution. Vol. 1, pp. 104-6. Paris, 1967.

Dulac, Liliane. “Christine de Pisan et le Malheur des Vrais Amans.” In Mélanges de Langue et de Littérature Médiévales Offerts à Pierre Le Gentil, pp. 223-33. Paris, 1973.

Dusevel, Hyacinthe. Biographie des hommes célèbres du département de la Somme. Vol. 1, pp. 209-11. Amiens, 1837.

Guichard, J.-M. “Hélisenne de Crenne.” Revue du XIXe siècle 2d ser., 8 (1840): 276-84.

Houston, John Porter. The Traditions of French Prose Style: A Rhetorical Study. Baton Rouge, 1981.

King, Margaret L. “Book-Lined Cells: Women and Humanism in the Early Italian Renaissance.” In Beyond Their Sex: Learned Women of the European Past, ed. Patricia H. Labalme, pp. 66-90, esp. pp. 68-69. New York, 1984.

La Monnoye. Cited by François La Croix du Maine, in Bibliothèque Françoise. Vol. 1, p. 362. Paris, 1772.

Lafranc, Abel. “A propos d'Hélisenne de Crenne.” Revue des Livres Anciens. 2 (1917): 376-77.

Loriente, Suzanne Marie-Marguerite. “L'Esthétique des Angoysses Douloureuses Qui Procedent d'Amours d'Hélisenne de Crenne.” Ph.D. diss., University of Southern California, 1982.

Loviot, Louis. “Hélisenne de Crenne.” Revue des Livres Anciens 2 (1917): 137-45.

Pasquier, Étienne. Lettres, folios 52b-53a. Paris, 1586.

Reynier, Gustave. Le roman sentimental avant l'Astrée, pp. 99-122, 205-6. Paris, 1908.

Richardson, L. M. The Forerunners of Feminism in French Literature of the Renaissance from Christine de Pisan to Marie de Gournay. Baltimore, 1929.

Saulnier, V.-L. “Quelques nouveautés sur Hélisenne de Crenne.” Bulletin de l'Association Guillaume Budé, 4th ser., no. 4 (1964): 459-63.

Schmidt, A.-M. In Histoire des Littératures. Vol. 3, pp. 201-2. Paris, 1963.

Sturel, René. “La Prose poétique au XVIe siècle.” In Mélanges offerts par ses amis et ses élèves à M. Gustave Lanson, pp. 47-60. Paris, 1922.

Waldstein, Helen. “Hélisenne de Crenne: A Woman of the Renaissance.” Ph.D. diss., Wayne State University, 1965.

Willard, Charity Cannon. Christine de Pizan: Her Life and Works. New York, 1984.

———. “A New Look at Christine de Pizan's Epistre au Dieu d'Amours.” In Secunda Miscellanea di Studi e Ricerche sul Quattrocento Francese, comp. Franco Simone and ed. Jonathan Beck and Gianni Mombello, pp. 73-92. Chambéry-Torino, 1981.