Material Afterlives of Early Modern Women Authors: Pernette du Guillet, Louise Labé and María de Zayas y Sotomayor

Material Afterlives of Early Modern Women Authors spans the sixteenth through the nineteenth century and explores what happens when book producers took early modern works by three female authors out of their original contexts and presented them to readers in new languages and new times. I trace three authors, Pernette du Guillet (1520-1545), Louise Labé (1525-1566) and María de Zayas y Sotomayor (1590-1661) through time and across national boundaries in order to see how the material book constructs and deconstructs their authorship. Much of the research on early modern women authors considers only the initial editions of their works; I demonstrate that later editions and translations of these works present the authors in new and conflicting ways. In Chapter One, I follow Pernette du Guillet’s Rymes from the Jean de Tournes’s 1545 Lyonnais and Jeanne de Marnef’s 1546 Parisian edition to Louis Perrin’s nineteenth century editions. With each re-publication of the work, the physical book reveals the strategies book producers used to present du Guillet and her works to readers. In Chapter Two, I compare the construction of authorship in the 1556 and 1762 editions of Louise Labé’s Œuvres. While we can perceive an interest in producing an author-figure in the sixteenth century edition, the eighteenth century edition builds on that production, making the author indissociable from the work. In Chapter Three, I examine Paul Scarron, Antoine le Métel d’Ouville and François le Métel de Boisrobert’s seventeenth century French translations of Spanish writer María de Zayas y Sotomayor’s Novelas amorosas y ejemplares and Desengaños amorosos. Each translator adapts the work for seventeenth century French
audiences in a different way, employing various strategies to make market the work and its authorship.