SOURCE: Chang, Leah L. “Clothing ‘Dame Helisenne’: The Staging of Female Authorship and the Production of the 1538 Angoysses douloureuses qui procedent d'amours.” Romanic Review 92, no. 4 (November 2001): 381-403.

[In the following essay, Chang examines how the narrative of Les Angoysses douloureuses as well as the process of printing the text of the 1538 edition of the novel contributed to the construction of the authorial figure of Hélisenne de Crenne.]

In Les Angoysses Douloureuses qui procedent d'amours (Paris, 1538), the protagonist Dame Helisenne owns a white cloak of which she is particularly fond: “J'estois fort curieuse en habillemens, c'estoit la chose ou je prenoye singulier plaisir,”¹ she recalls, describing the garment on which her lover, Guenelic, indiscreetly steps, a transgression that Dame Helisenne finds nonetheless quite pleasurable. By the end of the story another white wrapping appears, this time clothing a little book that Dame Helisenne leaves behind after her death. Helisenne's white cloak, a mask of purity that ironically comes to mark the erotic desire that it initially tries to conceal, is transmitted to the book. This book's neat exterior packaging and title, a moralistic warning against love, belie its real lesson: that no advice or social stricture can deter women and men from the hazards of love.²

The Angoysses Douloureuses is a fictional, novel-like text attributed to the author now known as “Helisenne de Crenne.” The book enjoyed enormous success, undergoing over six separate editions in the sixteenth century.³ However, we know almost nothing about its author. Critics generally agree that “Helisenne de Crenne” is a persona, perhaps the pseudonym of Marguerite Briet, a historical woman of the lesser French aristocracy who was married to a Philippe Fournel de Crenne. Nevertheless, the attribution of the work to Briet remains more or less an assumption since extant documentation of her life is sparse, and critical efforts to fill in the blanks have relied mostly on the extrapolation of her “biography” from the first part of the Angoysses Douloureuses. In this sense, “Marguerite Briet” is almost as much a construct as “Helisenne de Crenne”; both are devices serving a modern critical need to organize texts around an authorial identity, however fictive that identity might be.⁴ Nevertheless, because so little is known about the book's writer, the Angoysses Douloureuses offer a convenient text to think about the construction of the author figure. This article explores how the narrative and the material process of printing the 1538 edition together play with the authorial construct, in a period when printers exercised enormous influence over the production of texts, and when the concept of authorial primacy did not yet exist.

Helisenne's white cloak in the story is particularly intriguing because it represents a juncture between the “fiction” of the narrative and the “nonfiction” of the process that generates the material volume of the Angoysses Douloureuses. When the pure white silk reappears covering Helisenne's book at the end of the tale, it suggests that, like the cloak, the book will project one image of Helisenne—her purity, or her warning against love—while secretly harboring her erotic desires. Indeed, the 1538 volume published in Paris by Denys Janot, wears yet another cloak of dissimulation, this time in the form of the title page, which both represents and misrepresents the book's author. For, as the principal character in the plot who also narrates the story and passes for the author of the book, Dame Helisenne occupies a largely fictive and uncertain position.⁵ The title page announces that she has composed the work, and yet as the volume progresses, her authenticity as one of the book's producers becomes increasingly suspicious, especially since she dies before the end of the story. The title page becomes the site of a guessing game of authorial identity and function, and of fiction versus truth, played among the book's producers and the readers. To explore the relations in this game, I return to Helisenne's white cloak. The episode in which it appears orchestrates a contest between male and female figures around the question of Dame Helisenne's representation, and offers a framework for analyzing the dynamics between author and printer figures in the 1538 publication. In the second half of the article, I will turn to the particular case of the title page in the 1538 Angoysses Douloureuses to discuss the construction of authorial identity through the paratextual “clothing” of the first edition.⁶

The Angoysses Douloureuses is in many ways a classic tale of the mal mariée, often disturbing and exaggerated, but sometimes even comic. The book is divided into three sections, and the first Partie is written as a personal memoir in the voice of Dame Helisenne, which adds the seductive appearance of authenticity to the tale. She is a beautiful and chaste young woman, married at the age of eleven to a nobleman whose class status approximates her own. All is well with her marriage until the couple moves to another town to contest some property rights and Helisenne, peering out of her window, sees a young man, Guenelic, with whom she falls hopelessly in love. The two begin an emotionally tumultuous love affair, although their relation never takes a physical turn, which complicates the question of Helisenne's guilt and chastity. They exchange glances and words in semi-private places, in secluded parts of the church or law court, or in letters that the husband eventually finds, but they never embrace. Learning of the affair, Dame Helisenne's husband becomes furious, beats her, and destroys her letters and a manuscript in which, racked with guilty but pleasurable desire, she had chronicled her torments. He imprisons her in a castle at the end of the first Partie, and Dame Helisenne tells her readers that the Angoysses Douloureuses is a rewriting of the manuscript the husband had burned. She hopes it may fortuitously fall into Guenelic's hands so that he can orchestrate her rescue.

Dame Helisenne also writes the second Partie, the text tells the readers, but she adopts the voice of Guenlic. This section recounts the lover's exotic adventures with his friend Quezinstra in search of Dame Helisenne, which continue into the third Partie, again composed in Guenelic's voice. Guenelic finds Dame Helisenne languishing in her tower, frees her, and dies after recounting his tale to her. In an epilogue to the third part, the text shifts to the voice of Quezinstra, who narrates the death of Dame Helisenne from her own torments and explains how he published the little book wrapped in white silk that Helisenne left behind; the copy of the Angoysses Douloureuses that the reader now holds is presumably the result of his efforts.

THE CLOAK AND THE BOOK

The white silk covering the book that Quezinstra finds after Dame Helisenne's death invites the reader to connect the book's production to the clothing of the protagonist's body. In particular, the book's white wrapping recalls a scene in the first Partie in which Dame Helisenne drapes herself in a sumptuous white cloak to go to church, where she hopes to meet Guenelic and continue their amorous exchanges. It is the only time when the reader is permitted to see Dame Helisenne as a clothed female form in any detail.⁷ Her attractive body is a source of personal identity in the story, and in early scenes in the text, observers seem to see through her clothes, focusing immediately on the beauty of her body:

Quand me trouvoye en quelque lieu, remply de grand multitude de gens, plusieurs venoient entour moy pour me regarder (comme par admiration) disans tous en general, voyez la, le plus beau corps que je veis jamais. Puis apres, en me regardant au visaige, disoient, elle est belle: mais il n'est à accomparer au corps.

(100)

Even after dressing later in the white cloak and a rich, red satin robe, Dame Helisenne's clothes are penetrated by her admirers: “Voyez la, la creature excedant et oultrepassant toutes aultres en formosité de corps” (123). Her observers are enchanted by what they cannot see—her exiquisitely beautiful body is in fact hidden under the clothes—while they consider her exposed face attractive, but nothing special.

However, in the crucial moment in which it appears, the white cloak acts as a marker of Dame Helisenne's body for an audience of which both she and her husband are acutely conscious. Knowing that she pines for Guenelic, Dame Helisenne's husband orders her to dress elegantly for an excursion:

Il est demain le jour d'une feste solennele, parquoy je veulx et vous commande que vous accoustrez triumphamment, affin que vous assistez au temple avec moy, car doresnavant ne vous sera permis de sortir de la maison, sinon en ma compaignie, car je veulx veoir quelle contenance sera la vostre en ma presence, par ce que je suis certain que vostre amy se y trouvera.

(122)

Helisenne explains that her husband felt sorry for her sufferings,⁸ but the reader detects an alterior motive to her husband's request: he wants to use her clothes to prove publicly the purity of her body (about which he is growing increasingly skeptical) and to show her off. Dame Helisenne is quite ready to submit to this test, not only because her clothing lets her revel in her physical beauty—always a source of personal pride—but because the trip actually gives her the opportunity to see Guenelic: “Tel propos me tenoit mon mary, auquel ne feiz aulcune response, mais tins silence, nonobstant que tacitement grand joye et hilarité m'estoit irrigée, emanée, et exhibée, au moyen de l'esperance future de la veue de mon amy” (122). The text details the dressing scene and its pleasurable effect on both the protagonist and her husband:

… je vestis une cotte de satin blanc, et une robe de satin cramoisy, j'aornay mon chef de belles brodures, et riches pierres precieuses: et quand je fuz accoustrée, je commencay à me pourmener, en me mirant en mes sumptueulx habillemens, comme le paon en ses belles plumes, pensant plaire à aultres, comme à moy mesmes, et cependant mon mary se habilloit, lequel prenoit singulier plaisir en me voyant, et me dist qu'il estoit temps d'aller: et en ce disant, sortasmes de la chambre, en la compaignée de mes damoyselles, je cheminoie lentement, tenant gravité honneste, tout le monde jectoit son regard sur moy. …

(123)

This is the first instance in the text in which Helisenne expresses her own pleasure at her appearance, as well as the pleasure she hopes to inspire in others. Her husband is indeed satisfied, but his emotions are a rather ironic reaction to Helisenne's attempts to provoke Guenelic's desire. Even more remarkably, this invitation to transgression is encouraged at the unwitting insistence of the husband, who initially misunderstands the consequence that the clothes will have on Guenelic's behavior and on both his and his wife's reputation. In the end, the clothes invite the very infraction on Helisenne's chastity that the husband was eager to prevent.

Although the symbolism of the “pure” white cloak concealing the enticing scarlet, satin dress is hard to miss, Guenelic takes Dame Helisenne's duplicity one step further when he “transgresses” the clothes themselves:

… il venoit passer si pres de moy, qu'il marchoit sur ma cotte de satin blanc. J'estois fort curieuse en habillemens, c'estoit la chose ou je prenoye singulier plaisir, mais nonobstant cela, il ne m'en desplaisoit, mais au contraire, voluntairement et de bon cueur j'eusse baisé le lieu ou son pied avoit touché.

(124)

In spite of Helisenne's almost humorous shock at Guenelic's indiscretion—she at first concentrates on the injustice done to the clothing rather than on the indecent intimacy of the act—her indignation gives way almost immediately to an illicit pleasure. Her husband, however, registers his anger at the interaction by calling special attention to Guenelic's clumsy dissimulation: “Je m'esbahys de vostre amy, lequel n'a sceu dissimuler son amoureuse follye en ma presence, il luy procede de grande presumption de venir marcher sur vostre cotte, il semble par cela qu'il eust grand privaulté familiarité avecq vous” (124-125). The husband construes the garment as a marker of Dame Helisenne's propriety, and its violation as a sign of her and Guenelic's audacity. Thus the cloak again serves as a figural locus around which the tension between the constant dissimulation and disclosure of the love affair continue to build. Too late, the husband realizes his mistake; the next day he prohibits Helisenne from dressing again in elegant clothes (125).

The white cloak does not act only as a cover for Helisenne's body. Rather, it both represents and misrepresents her: at the time it appears, Dame Helisenne's body is indeed still chaste, while its beauty inflames the longing of her would-be lover.⁹ This double valence of the cloak also exposes a problematic station of contemporary women who saw female clothing as an extension of the limited control they exercised over their bodies and the messages communicated by the appearance of those bodies. For, in the end, Dame Helisenne's clothes are used as a communicative tool not between the lovers, but between the husband and Guenelic. The husband attempts to make a statement to Guenelic through her luxurious clothes, and Guenelic likewise returns the message by making his own “mark” on the white silk of the cloak, a message the husband clearly grasps.

The tension in the scene of the cloak complicates the problem of Dame Helisenne's agency. What is the protagonist's role in the messages inscribed on her clothes? In fact, although Dame Helisenne is not master of the messages about her body conveyed on her clothing, it is she who chooses to clothe herself specifically in a white satin cloak and a scarlet dress and thus chooses her self-representation. And in this light, one must rethink whether Helisenne misdirects her irritation when she initially focuses so ardently on the injustice done to her cloak. For, as the clothes hide her body by covering it, they also define, represent, and in some sense become it; the female body is absorbed into the device of its representation, constructed through the appearance of its wrapping.¹⁰ And while her husband and lover seem to dispute a single meaning of her body and clothes—the body is either chaste or defiled, the cloak is either pure or marked with Guenelic's footprint—for Helisenne the meaning of her clothes moves beyond the black-and-white of bodily chastity and corruption to enter the more ambiguous and ambivalent domain of female sexual desire. In the scene of the cloak, both the husband and Guenelic appropriate and simplify the “text” that she wants to project to an audience that includes both men. The result is a friction between the male and female messages about the status of Helisenne's body/text.

Through competing male messages imprinted on the white cloak in the story, Helisenne is inscribed as a chaste or libidinous creature while her own authority to represent herself is somewhat obscured by the tension between husband and lover. This capacity to represent multiply and ambiguously is a quality the cloak shares with the title page of the first edition. Like the clothing, the title page reflects Dame Helisenne's self-presentation, her “memoirs,” while simultaneously conveying another, male-authored message, this time from the printer Denys Janot. In both cases, Dame Helisenne's identity—as chaste wife or lover, or as author—is at stake; the little white book that Quezinstra decides to publish at the end of the story serves as a symbolic connection between the narrative and material production of the 1538 Angoysses Douloureuses.

As I discuss in the next section, Helisenne's cloak offers a metaphoric model of the relations between author and printer figures in the first edition, in place of concepts of copyright and textual ownership that did not exist in the sixteenth century. But the episode of the cloak also reveals a gendered dimension to the connection between material form and women's public representation. As Louise Labé will contend in 1555, women's clothes construct their identities even though they do not really belong to them. In her dedicatory epistle to her Euvres, she encourages women to turn to writing rather than clothing and jewelry, which she argues “… ne pouvons vrayement estimer notres, que par usage.”¹¹ Her rejection of clothes ironically mimics the message of contemporary conduct literature, which identified sumptuous adornments as devices of women's dissimulation, vanity, and immodesty, and encouraged women to dress themselves instead in virtue.¹² Labé, however, rejects clothing not because of its inventive capacity, but because women themselves do not own the instruments of this fashioning, and thus cannot claim to be in possession of their own construction. The Angoysses Douloureuses imply further that women's public construction can pivot around moral values linked with female sexuality, a cause for concern for women like Dame Helisenne if decisions about that form are not their own. The clothing trope in both texts suggests that physical form can reflect and inform meaning and value in gendered ways, an equation that extends, I would argue, to the material production of the 1538 Angoysses Douloureuses and the author figure associated with it. Like the white cloak of the story, the title page of the first edition is also inscribed with gendered messages in tension with one another: how, then, do the gendered polemics about Helisenne's represention—already metaphorized in the narrative through her cloak—invade the seemingly most typographical spaces of the volume?

“DAME HELISENNE” AND “DE CRENNE”: THE TITLE PAGES OF THE 1538 EDITION

The figuring of the author in the production of the 1538 edition is rendered particularly complex by obscure concepts of textual ownership and authority in the sixteenth century. Contemporary writers were especially conscious about the power of the printer in publication—whose work did an edition represent when it finally reached its readers? The early-modern book trade was rife with competition, and book producers sought to protect their financial investments in editions: booksellers were anxious to make a profit from sales, as were printers, who frequently lacked financial backers.¹³ Writers, who frequently financed their own publications, also wanted to protect their investment, and, in the interest of finding a typographer who would take care to print the edition well, sought to assure book producers that they would make a return on their time, labor, and money. The introduction of royal privileges in the late-fifteenth and early-sixteenth centuries represents this commercial priority: issued to writers as well as to other book producers, they granted supplicants a legitimate monopoly over the production and distribution of editions for a limited number of years, and promised to punish offenders.¹⁴

However, royal privileges to publish, which were expensive to procure and granted on a restricted basis, offered only limited legal recourse to book producers trying to protect their investments from competitors; they were not early forms of copyright in that they did not guard the artistic integrity of a work nor protect authors from other book producers who might appropriate their texts. Writers did not always oversee publications, and there is no doubt that printers were willing to make significant changes in order to augment the market appeal of a book with little or no legal repercussion. The Parisian printer Antoine Vérard, for example, printed Jean Bouchet's Regnars traversant in 1500, citing the well-known German author Sebastian Brant on the title page instead of Bouchet, who was young and inexperienced at the time; Bouchet sued Vérard, and attacked the printer in his poetry, but the alteration remained unchanged in subsequent editions.¹⁵ Writers complained regularly about the adverse effects of such commercial emphases on their reputations and texts: printers interpolated the work of one writer in the publications of another; ghost-written and cheaply produced editions were attributed to good authors; books of respected writers were poorly printed by authorized printers and pirates.¹⁶ As Cynthia Brown has thoroughly examined in the published works of the French rhétoriqueurs, writers challenged the printer's control in the market and attempted to assert their own authority by acquiring royal privileges in their name, by circulating complaints against book producers, or by foregrounding their authorial signatures and images in woodcuts and engravings in the editions they supervised.¹⁷ The absence of a legal and cultural acknowledgment of authorial primacy, however, raised several questions: who will control the production of a text—writer or book producer? How will this authority be constructed and recognized in the book market? Which figure will attract a wider buying audience and assure the readers of the quality, or alternatively, the seductiveness, of the publication?

The market interests and influences of early-modern printers are particularly apparent on contemporary title pages. The advent of print had reintroduced readers to the title page after it had disappeared from medieval codices; its initial purpose was to protect the rest of the text, since copies were often sold unbound.¹⁸ However, the development of the early-modern title page also demonstrates the growing experimentation with physical form in the production of books, along with the increasing status of book producers other than the writer. The earliest title pages gave only a brief title alone, printed on the top of an undecorated page, while other publication information, including the place and date of printing, appeared in the colophon; the name of the printer sometimes appeared as well.¹⁹ By the first quarter of the sixteenth century, however, title pages included not only the name and work of the author but also the printer, the place and date of printing, along with the printer's device, another means of identifying the individual or printing house that published the work, but also a way of decorating the page.²⁰ Contemporary printers were highly aware of the commercial as well as aesthetic potential of the title page, and the way in which its format style not only ornamented the text but also promoted their own business and artistic principles. Some printers (including Janot) used both the title page and the colophon to self-advertise, while others drew attention to themselves in creative ways by presenting their information in different ink color, font, or type size, or even in carefully contrived verses.²¹ Set formulae for establishing such material in the book did not exist and early-modern printers did not necessarily relegate this textual space to the purely practical domain. Instead, the title page was a place of experimentation both in its conception and presentation.²²

Creativity with the title page is a defining characteristic of the 1538 Angoysses Douloureuses. The first edition actually contains four title pages.²³ The first acts as title page to the entire work and presents “Dame Helisenne” as the writer of the three parts of the story. In addition, two interior title pages introduce the second and third parts of the volume (AA and AAA), and indicate that Dame Helisenne narrates in the voice of Guenelic.²⁴ I classify them as title pages since each includes a decorative woodcut compartment containing the title of their respective Partie, and each appears on its own leaf; the Partie that each introduces begins only on the next recto. Finally, a fourth title page announces Quezinstra's epilogue, a final account of the deaths of Helisenne and Guenelic, their voyage to the underworld, and the fate of the book that Helisenne leaves behind (FFF 8): “S'ensuyt une ample et accommodee narration, faicte par le magnanime Quezinstra, pour exhiber la mort immaturée de son compagnon fidele le gentil Guenelic: en comprenant ce qu'il intervint du predict Guenelic, et de sa dame Helisenne apres leurs deplorables fins, ce qui se declarera avec decoration du delectable stile poectique.” Although this last title page also includes a woodcut frame, it does not occupy its own leaf, and the text of the “Narration” begins immediately on its verso. Unlike the other title pages, the fourth appears at the end rather than at the beginning of a gathering of leaves. Although commercial demands may have directed these typographical choices, it is worth considering their effect on the presentation of the author.²⁵ The third title page, for instance, does not tell us that the third Partie contains Quezinstra's epilogue, and unlike the second and third titles, the fourth title introducing the epilogue does not indicate that Dame Helisenne speaks in the voice of Quezinstra. Thus, this fourth title page appears to signal a type of addendum, a brief but unexpected coda to the third Partie that is written not by Dame Helisenne (perhaps, for the reader can never be sure) but by Quezinstra.

As each of the first three title pages introduces a new part of the narrative, each also begins an entirely new set of page gatherings and groups (identified by the “A”—“K,” “AA”—“MM,” and “AAA”—“HHH” signatures). These patterns indicate that in their typographical forms, the three parts were conceived of as entirely separate “books” from each other; I have wondered whether they were each meant to be sold individually.²⁶ Nevertheless, the page signatures indicate that the fourth title page was printed alongside the last part of the text that is narrated in Guenelic's voice.²⁷ The presence of this fourth title page hints that the book's producers were playing with meaning conveyed by material form, using a title page to mark a transition in the authorial figure to Quezinstra from Dame Helisenne (whose shift into Guenelic's voice had already been marked by the second and third title pages).

However, it is the text on the first three title pages that especially complicates their role in the construction of the authorial figure. The title on the first runs as follows: “Les Angoysses Douloureuses Qui Procedent D'Amours: Contentãtz troys parties, Composées par Dame Helisenne: Laquelle exhorte toutes personnes à ne suyvre folle Amour”. The title clearly specifies that “Dame Helisenne” has composed the work: nowhere does the name “Helisenne de Crenne” appear on the page. Nevertheless, on the second title page, an enlarged, printed De Crenne appears in place of the publishing information of the first title page, disjointed from the rest of the page by its obtrusive type size. Its overwhelming size ensures that the reader does not miss it, and almost seems designed to shock; certainly, its looming presence on the second title pages underscores its absence on the first. The third title page also contains a “De Crenne,” printed and laid out on the page in a similar fashion to that of the preceding title page. Moreover, a smaller “De Crenne”—in a type size compatible with the font used to print the actual story—surfaces at the end of the first part of the book, just before Janot's colophon giving the publication information. A similarly sized “De Crenne” reappears at the end of the second Partie, this time following another Janot colophon and printer's mark. There is no “De Crenne” figure at the end of the third Partie.

Who, then, is “De Crenne,” and how does the figure function at the end of the Parties and on the ancillary title pages? Does “De Crenne” necessarily represent a female, authorial persona, especially if, as most modern critics assume, it is the married name of the supposed author Marguerite Briet, and therefore a masculine gendered patronymic? In fact, these questions are never explicitly answered in the 1538 volume. The tendency of these critics to overlook the fact that “De Crenne” never actually sits juxtaposed to “Dame Helisenne” is due, I believe, to the assumption that “Helisenne de Crenne” is the full name of the author and that the two names must necessarily signify one person. But in truth the “De Crenne” figures float by themselves on the pages on which they appear, separated from other text by punctuation and on the title pages by font size. The narrative quality of the titles further contributes to the sense that “De Crenne” and “Dame Helisenne” are two distinct entities. For example, who is it that tells the reader that the third part is “Composée par Dame Helisenne parlant en la personne de son Amy Guenelic: Comprenant la mort de ladicte Dame, apres avoir esté retrouvée par ledict Guenlic son amy”? Is it Dame Helisenne who speaks? The printer, Denys Janot? Or perhaps the ambiguously gendered “De Crenne”?

And who determined the appearance of this “De Crenne” in the multiple title pages and next to the printer's colophons? As I demonstrated earlier, the title page was chiefly the domain of the printers, and this authority to control the presentation of both the text and the author was enough to make more than a few writers nervous about publishing.²⁸ In fact, the ubiquitous paratextual presence of Janot in the 1538 edition not only reveals much about the function of the “De Crenne” figures but suggests that Janot was essential to their instrumentation.

ENTER JANOT

From the first title page of the Angoysses Douloureuses, Janot wastes no time or space in defining his role in the production of the book. If the reader is unfamiliar with the quality of Janot's work, the printer may be found, conveniently along with the latest copies of the book, at the address announced on the first title page: “On les vend a Paris la Rue neufve Nostre dame a Lenseigne Saincte Jehan Baptiste contre Saincte Geneviefve des Ardens” (f. A). Janot reiterates this information at the ends of the first and second Parties in colophons that also reemphasize his profession as printer and bookseller: “Cy finist la premiere partie des Angoisses D'amours: Nouvellement Imprimées à Paris par Denys Janot, Libraire et Imprimeur, Demourant en la Rue neufve nostre Dame à l'enseigne Sainct Jean Baptiste contre saincte Genviefve des Ardens” (f. Kiii).²⁹ His monogram appears in the historiated woodcut compartment of the first title page, and one of his printer's marks (flowers in a vase), surrounded by his mottoes (“Patere Aut Abstine” and “Nul Ne Si Frotte”), appears on the verso of the last page of the first Partie and again after his colophon at the end of the second Partie.³⁰

Initially, Janot's repeated and diverse appearances in the Angoysses Douloureuses may seem little more than paratextual bravura, an exuberance with perhaps a reasonable motive. Self-advertisement in the books he printed was certainly an efficient method of promoting his work and advancing his career. His father, Jehan I Janot, had been printing since 1488 and married Macée Trepperel, the daughter of another successful imprimeur-libraire, Jehan I Trepperel, with whom Jehan Janot had been associated since 1515. Denys Janot was established in his own workshop “à l'enseigne de sainct Jehan Baptiste” by 1532, and one might imagine that he was anxious to distinguish himself both from his extended family, the Trepperel, and from Alain Lotrian, a printer with whom Janot worked on “la rue Neufve Nostre Dame” until 1531.³¹ In 1538, he was still approximately six years away from succeeding Olivier Mallard as “imprimeur du roi en langue française,” and probably eager to nurture a growing clientele of authors and book buyers.³² But although many printers seem to have regarded liminary spaces as a particularly commercial domain for promoting their work,³³ the repetition of the Janot colophon and printer's mark and even the presence of the additional title pages seem excessive.³⁴ Even more curiously, with the exception of the first title page, Janot's name, address, and/or printer's mark always appear within the book alongside a “De Crenne” figure, if not directly preceding or following the figure, then at least within the same verso/recto opening. In other words, in the eyes of the reader, the figures of “De Crenne” and Janot always appear adjacent to each other and, to a certain degree, inseparable.

This positioning of the two names seems hardly coincidental. I would argue that Janot's presence as a type of finishing touch for each section of the book speaks to the purpose of the “De Crenne” figures. Plastered on the interior title pages, or hovering within the colophons, both Janot and “De Crenne” represent parties whose signatory seals testify to the quality of the aesthetic as well as the creative and stylistic aspects of the book. It is possible to read the relation of these two figures as a type of the increasingly frequent competition between author and publisher that Cynthia Brown has documented in printed texts of the early French Renaissance.³⁵ As the privileged printer and bookseller of the Angoysses Douloureuses,³⁶ Janot reemphasizes his textual control each time he advertises his name, profession, and place of business in the colophons and on the title pages. The huge “De Crenne” figures, however, assert the existence of yet another, if mysterious, producer of the book, different from either printer or Dame Helisenne. Whether or not this “competition” was staged in the liminary texts by the printer, the author, or both, it is tempting to see between Janot and the patronymic “De Crenne” a tension similar to that between Guenelic and the husband in the scene of the white cloak. On the title pages and in the colophons, Janot and the figure of “De Crenne” do seem to vie for the superior position in book production over the nominal authorship of Dame Helisenne, whose death just before the end of the narrative renders her unconvincing as a true producer of the text. One senses that Janot and “De Crenne” are indeed struggling over Dame Helisenne's textual “body,” since the symbol of the white cloak that once covered her living body returns after her death in the white silk of the book that she leaves behind in the story, the book that becomes the published Angoysses Douloureuses. And like Dame Helisenne's body, which at the scene of the cloak was at a crossroads between lascivious desire for Guenelic and chaste loyalty to her husband, the book also walks the fine line between warning others away from unchaste thoughts and actions (“O tres cheres dames, quand je considere qu'en voyant comme j'ay esté surprinse, vous pourrez evitez les dangereulx laqs d'amours, en y resistant du commencent, sans continuer en amoureuses pensées,” (97)) and relishing those desires through their (re)telling.

And yet, Janot's textual markers become less representative of the printer as a competitor to the author's textual control, and more indicative of a potential collaboration between author and printer figures, when one considers that print is in fact inscribed in the Angoysses Douloureuses as the climax of the narrative. Much of Quezinstra's final epilogue has to do with the printing of Dame Helisenne's little white book.³⁷ In many ways, this final vignette seems to be the writer's solution to the problem of the protagonist's death and the strain it exerts on the authenticity of Dame Helisenne's authorship. That it is Quezinstra who recounts the deaths of Helisenne and Guenelic in some sense cloaks and dissimulates the obvious fictions of both the death of the protagonist-cum-author and, one suspects, the love affair context that ostensibly drives the composition of the story in the first place. The fourth title page supports his authorship of the epilogue and helps blur the line between fact and fiction since, unlike the case of Guenelic in the second and third titles, it never claims that Dame Helisenne writes in Quezinstra's voice.³⁸ Most importantly, Quezinstra sees to the publication of the book. He decides to publish it for two reasons. First, he promises to obey Guenelic's wish that he “manifest” (manifester) their troubles to the world. Secondly, he hopes the book will warn readers to avoid lascivious love: “… afin que tous lecteurs qui s'occuperont à lire ces angoisses doloreuses, par l'exemple d'icelles se puissent conserver et garder que la sensualité ne domine la raison, pour timeur de succomber en ceste lascivité, dont ne se peult ensuyvre, que peines et travaulx intollerables …” (506).

A printer is clearly essential to such a task, and the narrative actually prescribes his important function in detail, even though Janot is never explicitly named in the text. After the deaths of Guenelic and Dame Helisenne, the god Mercury visits Quezinstra, and it is actually he who discovers the white book. After taking Quezinstra to the underworld, where they deliver the souls of the protagonists, Mercury whisks the book up to heaven where he gives it to Pallas Athena. Jupiter orders the publication of the book, “affin de manifester au monde les peines, travaulx, et angoysses douloureuses, qui procedent à l'occasion d'amours”; the eventual title of the volume derives from his phrasing (503). The gods decide that the city of Paris is the most appropriate place for publication. Pallas Athena and Venus agree, although the two squabble over whether the city is more venerable for its intellectual or sensual attributes. Mercury decides Venus's view is more trivial—indeed, dangerous to men and women just like Guenelic and Dame Helisenne—but the book is clearly meant to appeal to an educated public that is simultaneously an avid audience of amorous adventure (or perhaps the book is meant to bridge two disparate audiences). Janot, as it turns out, is just the sort of Parisian printer to reach both types of reader: in 1538-1539, for example, he published not only erudite works such as La premiere [et seconde] Partie des Epistres familieres de M. T. Cicero, and L'histoire Catlinaire de Salluste, but also humanist love poetry, such as Les Oeuvres de Clément Marot or Les Triumphs de Petrarques.³⁹

Indeed, a striking representation of Janot's arbitrating function between love and erudition in the Angoysses Douloureuses appears in the decorated frame that the printer used for the title page to the second Partie (Fig. 2). The bottom of the frame depicts the Judgment of Paris. The scene captures a moment when Paris is on the cusp of making his decision, but as Zanger has suggested, the addition of Mercury to this frame indicates that Janot quite consciously links the account of publishing the white book in the epilogue, indeed the publishing of the 1538 edition itself, to the legend of Paris and the golden apple. Paris awards the apple to Venus, but Janot will offer the Angoysses Douloureuses instead to several audiences, balancing the dangerous effects of the apple/text.⁴⁰ Janot embodies Paris—both the city and the mythological figure—to become a new Paris, a representative of the technological prowess of the book trade and a mediating agent of the text as it is dispersed to multiple readers. Although the mythological Paris was eventually punished for his choice, the Paris of the woodcut frame remains suspended just prior to his decision, and the reader is left to wonder about the choice he will make and the risks he will incur. The mythical Paris was a lover who won a beautiful woman in exchange for the apple; one might imagine the lucrative prize Janot hoped to gain from shaping and imprinting Dame Helisenne's corpus (a bit like her lover Guenelic) and offering it to the public. But this scene in the woodcut also suggests that Janot plays with the notion that the printer/Paris is somehow a character in the final moments of the narrative, alongside Mercury and the goddesses. The woodcut frame, then, a mark of 1538 edition's materiality and of Janot's influence on the production of the book, corroborates the idea that the physical processes that yield the 1538 edition are in some sense the culmination of the narrative fiction.

It is, of course, impossible to determine whether or not the writer of the Angoysses Douloureuses had secured Janot as a printer at the time of composing the epilogue. More importantly, however, Janot's role is absorbed into the story, transforming the physical means of collecting and disseminating the many personae and voices in the work into the climax of the tale. Rather than a process that remains exclusive from the creation of the literary text, printing in Paris becomes an essential element of the narrative. It is a climax that is ideally ad infinitum for the story of the lovers will be available to the public for as long as the book remains in publication and accessible to readers, thanks to the printer. In light of Quezinstra's epilogue, Janot's presence in the title pages and colophons takes on new meaning beyond either self-advertisement or a way of representing the different faces of Dame Helisenne, to become the step that completes the circular trajectory of the reader's relation to the book. The first title page acts with the other instruments of print as the proof that Quezinstra has done his job, and that the lovers are in some sense vindicated through the book's publication. By the last page of the epilogue, the 1538 Angoysses Douloureuses seems to have back-tracked on itself, showing its audience another story that may be read on the title pages and through the plot—the story of the book's inevitable success.

The absorption of Janot into the story, however, does not fully explain the significance of the “De Crenne” figure or its rapport with “Dame Helisenne.” Possibly, “De Crenne” functions as an authorial alter-ego whose authority stands in distinct opposition to Dame Helisenne, embodied in a patronymic that complicates the relation between the author and printer figures. For, as a female authorial figure, Dame Helisenne takes a wholly passive role toward the printing of her white book. She dies, after all, in the final vignette, and the publication is enabled by distinctly male figures: Mercury, Quezinstra, Jupiter, and ultimately Janot. And yet, just as the fluidity of Dame Helisenne's author-narrator-character roles prevents the reader from pinning down her relation to the text, so the presence of the mysterious “De Crenne” figure on the title pages suggests that the reader should hesitate from ascribing Dame Helisenne's meekness in the plot to the actual writer of the work. Just as there is no guarantee that Dame Helisenne is anything other than a fictive character, there is no guarantee that her declarations of humility are anything other than mere pretension—posturing, fiction, and dissimulation to a seduce an audience through her protestations, and draw them into a succès à scandale. Part of this titillating appeal resides in the enigma of the plot and protagonist: the audience cannot tell if the scandalous story is fictive or true, cannot resolve if the protagonist is a real or imagined woman, and cannot determine whether the “author” is better reflected in the names “Dame Helisenne” or “De Crenne.” The appeal of this uncertainty recalls the intense attraction that Helisenne's clothed body in the story held for her observers, who were drawn more to the female body that they could not really see than to the face that lay bare to the public.

In this light, one might consider whether the episode of the white cloak—in which male and female figures construct and represent multiply a woman's public image through her clothing—is in its own way a subtly poignant anticipation of the gendered and competitive, but ultimately productive, dynamics between Janot, “De Crenne,” and “Dame Helisenne” that characterize the 1538 publication of the Angoysses Douloureuses. Ultimately, the identity of the individual (or individuals) who stage these tensions both in the story and on the title pages remains speculative, but the first edition fashions an authorial construct that resists singular meaning and definition. The author may be manifest somewhat here in the seductive character of “Dame Helisenne,” somewhat there in the imposing “De Crenne” figure, and its production is shaped as much by the medium of print as by the voices of the narrators. By inscribing the printing of the book into its plot, the producers of the work create a textual moebius strip in which the technical and imaginative processes of book production are inextricably entwined. Subsuming the competitive atmosphere of early-modern book production—the challenge to the writer's authority by the printer/bookseller's during printing and marketing—the narrative anticipates publication, thus transfiguring Janot and his marks in the book into characters alongside “Dame Helisenne” in an ongoing story. In the final book product, Janot is less a competitor to Dame Helisenne's (and perhaps “De Crenne's”) authorial control, and more a collaborator, or even a tool, in a cycle of textual production, dispersion, and consumption. To ask “Who is De Crenne?” might in itself constitute one way in which readers are in turn absorbed into this textual web.

Notes

1. Helisenne de Crenne, Les Angoysses Douloureuses qui procedent d'amours, ed. Christine de Buzon (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1997) 124. All references to the narrative will be to this edition. In order to facilitate reading, I have substituted “i” for “j” and “v” for “u” where appropriate.

2. The connection between books and clothing was made more than once among early modern women writers, who likened clothing to the printing of their texts. For example, a 1635 version of Marie de Gournay's preface to Montaigne's Essais asks readers to forgive minor printing errors, insisting “si ton esprist est digne de sa lecture [des Essais], tu les sçauras bien r'habiller.” In 1586, Catherine Des Roches likened the correct printing of her writings to a young girl dressed by herself and the publisher: “aiant je ne sçay comment rendu plus estroite la belle robe blanche et noire qu'elle avoit receüe de vostre liberale courtoisie, je suis encore si tardive à l'en accoustrer.” Marie de Gournay, “Préface à l'édition de 1635 des Essais,” ed. Philippe Desan, Montaigne Studies 2 (December, 1990) 96. Madeleine et Catherine des Roches, Les Missives, ed. Anne R. Larsen (Genève: Droz, 1999) 210.

3. For a comprehensive list of editions and their variations, and for locations of the 1538 version, see de Buzon's introduction to her edition, 44-69.

4. For examples of two important twentieth-century publications of the Angoysses Douloureuses, which nevertheless only reproduce the first part of the three-part story, see the editions edited by Paule Demats (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1968) and Jérome Verycrusse (Paris: Lettres Modernes Minard, 1968). For a discussion of the categorical function of the authorial identity, see Roger Chartier, L'ordre des livres: Lecteurs, auteurs, bibliothèques en Europe entre XIV et XVIIIe siècle, (Aix-en-Provence: Alinea, 1992) Chapter 2.

5. For a critical discussion of these various identities see Diane S. Wood's presentation of Helisenne's multi-faceted persona in “The Evolution of Hélisenne de Crenne's Persona,” Symposium (Summer 1991) 140-151.

6. For the typographical aspects of title pages and colophons of the first Parisian edition, I am working principally with the copy housed in the Bibliothèque Nationale (Rés. p Z2013). Due to the fragility of this copy, I have had to limit reproductions to the four images included in this article. The 1538 edition was printed in -8°. In his “Denis Janot, Parisian Printer and Bookseller (fl. 1529-1544): A bibliographical study in two volumes” (Thesis: University of Warwick, Department of French Studies, 1976), Stephen Philip John Rawles lists measurements for the text on an average page of the Angoysses Douloureuses as 121 by 70 mm. The binding of the BN copy is postsixteenth century. Denys Janot was an early pioneer in the use of the woodblock and illustrated frontispiece, and his 1538 version of the Angoysses Douloureuses contains over sixty woodcuts that loosely illustrate the plot; on Janot as a trend-setter in this field, see Nina Catach, L'orthographe française à l'époque de la Renaissance (Genève: Droz, 1968) 248. It is the presence of multiple title pages in the 1538 Angoysses Douloureuses, complete with woodcut frames, that particularly interests me in this article, and that distinguishes Janot's work from that of other printers. Janot appears to have been fond of using title pages to separate different parts of a single work. For example, he uses them to distinguish the two parts of the 1539 Epitres Familières et Invectives, also authored by “Dame Helisenne”; his Oeuvres de M. T. Cicero, published the same year, also uses a simple title page—printed on its own leaf, but this time without decorative frames—to divide different parts of the work. As I discuss in the second half of this article, it is the way in which the title pages, together with the narrative of the Angoysses Douloureuses, play with and construct the authorial figure that is particularly important to this study. Helisenne's white cloak in the story offers a way to conceptualize these dynamics, for it too explores the meaning of material form in the construction of a persona.

7. There are other moments in the story when Dame Helisenne tells us she dresses in fine clothing, but unlike the episode with the white cloak, those scenes never reveal details such as the type of clothing or the color of the garments.

8. Her husband tells her: “M' amye, je vous prie que delaissez voz pleurs et gemissemens, et reduysez vostre cueur en consolée lyesse. Quant à moy, je ne vous presteray matiere, ny occasion de melencolye” (122). He then tells her of the “feste solennele” that will take place and asks her to dress finely for the occasion.

9. For a discussion of a similar paradox of female chastity that provokes its own violation, see Stephanie Jed, Chaste Thinking, The Rape of Lucretia and the Birth of Humanism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989).

10. Abby Zanger argues for the critical importance of clothing to the construction of the female royal body in her analysis of the efforts to transform the Spanish infanta María Teresa into a French queen upon her marriage to Louis XIV. See Chapter 2 of her Scenes from the Marriage of Louis XIV: Nuptial Fictions and the Making of Absolutist Power (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997) 37-67. For other discussions of women's clothing and cosmetics as paradigms of female representation in premodern Europe see Howard Bloch “Silence and Holes: The Roman de Silence and the Art of the Trouvère,” Yale French Studies 70 (1986) 95; Frances Dolan, “Taking the Pencil out of God's Hand: Art, Nature, and the Face-Painting Debate in Early Modern England,” PMLA 108, no. 2 (1993) 224-239.

11. Louise Labé, Œuvres Complètes, ed. François Rigolot (Paris: Garnier Flammarion, 1986) 41.

12. For example, Pierre Changy's translation of Vives's De institutio foeminae christianae claimed that women's ornamentation defies nature and God, while Jean de Marconville argued that rich clothing inflames the desire of others and threatens their chastity, as well as that of the women who wear them. Changy, Livre de l'Institution de la Femme Chrestienne Tant en son enfance que mariage et viduité, Aussi de l'office de Mary (1542; Genève: Slatkine Reprints, 1970); Marconville, De la Bonté et Mauvaistié des Femmes, ed. Richard A. Carr (1566; Paris: Honoré Champion, 2000).

13. On the expenses of printing and the commercial interests of book producers see Natalie Zemon Davis, “Protestantism and the Printing Workers of Lyons: A Study in the Problem of Religion and Social Class During the Reformation,” Ph.D. Dissertation (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan 1959) 153-189. On the merchant and artisan origins of many printers see Sheila Edmunds, “From Schoeffer to Vérard: Concerning the Scribes who Became Printers,” Printing and the Written Word: The Social History of Books, ed. Sandra Hindman (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991); Rudolf Hirsch, Printing, Selling, and Reading 1450-1550 (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1974) 18-19.

14. The privilege was an official document, issued in France most often by the royal chancery or the Parliament of Paris, or in the provinces by the Prêvot de Paris. Printers, publishers, booksellers, and writers were all eligible to petition for a privilege. The protection it offered was limited; privileges were usually in effect for three to five years, up to ten years maximum. The penalties for violating a privilege could be fierce, including confiscation of the illegal books, fines, and sometimes the cost of the case if the offender was brought to trial. As an unauthorized 1556 edition of Labé's Euvres indicates, however, privileges did not always ward off potential ghost editions. Nevertheless, a printer who obtained a privilege and printed an extract of it in his editions, as many did, could at the very least warn others of pending sanctions against illicit printings of the book. A privilege also endorsed a book to the public by advertising its authenticity. For authors, privileges helped ensure the quality printing of a text (in which the reputations of both printer and author were at stake); it also helped many writers secure printers who may have been unwilling to invest their time, labor, and finances in the project without such protection. For the definitive study of the use of book privileges in Renaissance France see Elizabeth Armstrong, Before Copyright, The French Book-Privilege System 1498-1526 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).

15. Jennifer Britnell, Jean Bouchet (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1986) 81-82; Cynthia Brown, Poets, Patrons, and Printers: Crisis of Authority in Late Medieval France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995) 27.

16. Such complaints appear in many Renaissance privileges, prefaces, and other paratexts by writers and scholar-printers including the various rhétoriquers, Erasmus, Henri Estienne, Dolet, Rabelais, Marot, Ronsard, Du Bellay, Montaigne, and Marie de Gournay. For syntheses of some of these complaints see Brown, “Late Medieval Writers as Owners and Protectors of their Texts,” Chapter 1, Poets, Patrons, and Printers 18-59; Hirsch passim; George Hoffmann, “The Art of Proofreading,” Chapter 4, Montaigne's Career (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998) 84-91.

17. See Brown's chapters 1-4.

18. Printers incorporated this first page to prevent the text from soiling, leaving the recto of the first leaf blank and beginning the printing of the text on its verso. After 1480, printers began using a brief title on this recto in order to enable easier identification of the work. Lucien Febvre and Henri Jean Martin, L'Apparition du Livre (Paris: Albin Michel, 1958) 120. According to Rudolf Hirsch, the earliest documented title page in France of this sort appeared in 1486, in a volume printed by Pierre Levet; “Title Pages in French Incunables, 1486-1500,” Gutenberg-Jahrbuch (1978): 63.

19. Not all early imprints, however, foreground the name of the book producers. Gutenberg's famous 42-line Bible, for instance, does not divulge the name of the printer or his backers.

20. Alfred W. Pollard, Last words on the History of the Title-Page with Notes on some colophons and twenty-seven fac-similes of title-pages (London: John C. Nimo, 1891) 26, 30.

21. The title page of the 1488 Breviarum Parisiense, for example, printed by Le Rouge for the publisher Commin, boasts a poem indicating where the potential reader might purchase a copy: “Qui en veult avoir on entrevue / A tresgrant marche et bon pris / A la rose en la rue neufve / De nostre dame de Paris.” Cited in Hirsch 64. Elizabeth Armstrong also notes literary examples of advertising a royal privilege to publish; Before Copyright, The French Book-Privilege System, 1498-1526 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990) 140.

22. Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin note the increasing pressure to fill up the title page with words and decorations in the early part of the sixteenth century. Moving information about the printing from the colophon to the title page may have been part of this trend. On the changing trends in title pages through the mid-sixteenth century, see their L'Apparition du Livre (Paris: Albin Michel, 1958) 120-121.

23. I use the following terminology to describe how pages of a printed book were collated and sewn together. Since multiple pages were printed on the front and back of one large piece of paper, and then folded according to the number of pages, the bookbinder needed a systematic way to determine how to fold the sheets so that the pages would appear in the proper order. Thus, printers provided a mark—usually a letter and a number—on the lower right hand corner of the first few printed pages; this letter is called a “signature.” The letter and numbers on the first set of pages, for example, might be A—A4; in an octavo like the Angoysses Douloureuses, the next four pages would not need signatures since their order would naturally follow the first folds determined by the signatures on the initial four pages. A collection of pages, all of which belong to the same signature pattern, is called a “gathering.” Additional gatherings usually follow an alphabetical pattern; thus the second gathering would begin with “B,” the third with “C,” and so forth. The collection of these gatherings bound together is called a “group.” Finally, additional groups were marked by a new pattern of letters and numbers. In the case of the Angoysses Douloureuses, the second group begins “AA,” and the third begins with “AAA.” For further description of these terms and practices see D. C. Greetham, Textual Scholarship: An Introduction (New York: Garland Publishing Inc., 1994) 128-136.

24. The second title runs as follows: “La seconde partie des angoisses douloureuses, qui procedent d'amours: Composée par Dame Helisenne, Parlant en la personne de son Amy Guenelic: En laquelle sont comprins les faicts d'armes de Quezinstra et dudict Guenelic errans par le pays, en cherchant ladict Dame.” The third title begins with identical language, but substitutes the following phrase after the colon: “Comprenant la mort de ladicte Dame, apres avoir esté retrouvée par ledict Guenelic son amy.”

25. For instance, Janot might have decided not to put the fourth title page on a separate leaf in order to economize on paper. In his study of the emblems in Maurice Scève's Délie, Edwin M. Duvall stresses the importance of typographical considerations in the layout of texts and images. See his “Articulation of the ‘Délie’” Emblems, Numbers, and the Book,” Modern Language Review 75 (1980) 65-75. I thank Abby Zanger of Harvard University for underscoring the importance of considering the commercial reasons behind book layout and ornamentation.

26. Since in the sixteenth century printed books were usually sold in unbound copies, the purchaser could bind them as he or she saw fit, using a favorite bookbinder or one in association with the bookseller or printer. Or, the reader could choose not to bind the book at all, which would minimize the price. Denys Janot could have had all three Parties available for purchase separately in his shop on La Rue Neuve Nostre Dame. Or they could have been sold together, and the signature patterns represent the printer's way of facilitating the future binding process. The latter seems most likely, since most extant copies include all the Parties. In the end, however, there is no way to tell definitively how the book was originally intended to be sold and circulated.

27. The last page of Guenelic's narrative appears on FFF 7 v°, and Quezinstra's epilogue begins on the recto of FFF 8.

28. On writers' anxiety about the textual authority of printers see Cynthia Brown, Poets, Patrons, and Printers: Crisis of Authority in Late Medieval France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991); George Hoffmann, “The Montaigne Monopoly: Revising the Essais under the French Privilege System,” PMLA 108 (1993) 309-311, 315.

29. I cannot entirely explain the variation on the title that Janot uses in this colophon. Most likely, he needed to justify the lines and shortened the title of the book in order to do so.

30. Philippe Renouard, Les Marques Typographiques Parisiens de XVe et XVIe Siècle (Paris: H. Champion, 1926) 149-150. The compartment is number 485 and the printer's mark is number 480.

31. For the family tree of the Janot and Trepperel, see Emile Picot's entry in Revue d'histoire et de littérature 2 (1887) 47-50.

32. Elizabeth Armstrong claims that Janot was granted this title in 1543, while Henri Omont claims he succeeded to the position in 1544. See Omont, Catalogue des Editions Française de Denys Janot (Paris, 1899) 12-13. Armstrong notes that in the 1540's this title was barely more than nominal permission to print all French books that passed the censorship. See her Robert Estienne Royal Printer; an historical study of the Elder Stephanus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1954) 122.

33. Elizabeth Armstrong, Before Copyright, The French Book-Privilege System, 1498-1526 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990) 144.

34. In my continued examination of imprints by Janot and his contemporaries, I have not yet seen its match.

35. See Brown's Poet's, Patrons, and Printers.

36. The royal privilege for the 1538 Angoysses Douloureuses is accorded in Janot's name, and is printed on the verso of the title page.

37. This description of the book's anticipated publication does have literary antecedents. The most notable can be found in Boccaccio's Elegia di Madonna Fiammetta (c. 1343), which has been identified as one of the primary models for the composition of the Angoysses Douloureuses, especially since it was translated into French in 1532 (Lyon: Claude Nourry, 1532).

38. Quezinstra also smooths over other potential flaws in the vraisemblance of the story. He explains, for instance, how it is that Guenelic's adventures came to be recorded with Dame Helisenne's own story, even though the two had only be reunited for a short time: “… je congneuz par l'intitulation, que en ce estoient redigez toutes noz entreprinses et voyages, Parquoy je peuz facilement comprendre, que la pauvre defuncte l'avoit escript, apres le recit que Guenelic luy en pourroit avoir faict” (489).

39. Omont 22.

40. Abby Zanger recently noted the relationship of this woodcut to the final vignette in a paper entitled “‘Les Angoysses douloureuses qui procedent … le livre’: Helisenne de Crenne and the Turmoils of Passing to Print,” presented in a conference on “Material Cultures” in Edinburgh (July 2000). I am indebted to both her and her research assistant Vera Keller for drawing my attention to the significance of Paris in the woodcut.