Down to Earth and Up to Heaven: The Nine Muses in Martin Le Franc’s “Le Champion des Dames”

Field: Arts and Humanities (Social Sciences)

The Champion of Ladies (1440-42) by Martin Le Franc represents the most extensive defense of women (24,336 octosyllabic verses) within a long series of vernacular works in prose and poetry comprising the corpus of La Querelle des Femmes, which took place during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in France.1 In the Champion of Ladies, an allegorical response to classical and contemporary misogynous attacks on women, Le Franc employed a poetic form composed of octaves (huritains) of octosyllabic verses rhyming ababbcbc and a debate structure which created not only narrative tension but a diegetic reality similar to the extra-diegetic one of the historical Querelle des Femmes. In each of the work's five books, the allegorical Champion of Ladies, known as Franc Vouloir or Free Will, presented arguments answering the challenges raised by the five allegorical henchmen of his misogynous opponent Malebouche or Badmouth: Brief Conseil or Hasty Judgment (Book I); Vilain Penser or Evil Thinking (Book II); Trop Cuidier or Much Presuming (Book III); Lourd Entendement or Slow Wit (Book IV); and Faulx Semblant or Seeming False (Book V). Each of these five personifications reflects a specific negative attribute of women. Book IV is particularly illustrative of the author's championship in defense of ladies, because in that book Free Will adduces various women to support his arguments against Lourd Entendement or Slow Wit; these ladies include intriguing figures such as Le Franc's near contemporaries Christine de Pizan and Joan of Arc; the notorious Popess Joan; and women long regarded as allegorical figures - namely, the Nine Muses. Through his inclusion of the Muses, viewed variously prior to the late-medieval period, Le Franc entered into the longstanding literary discussion of these female personifications of arts, letters, and sciences. In the centuries prior to 1440, the Muses were depicted as universal movers by Martianus Capella, as ambivalent influences by Boethius, and as primal nymphs by Isidore of Seville; and Giovanni Boccaccio used them to satirize contemporary women in his Corbacdo. There existed no overriding interpretation which prevailed. While Martin Le Franc clearly drew upon such source texts (as those mentioned) in his Champion of Ladies, unlike his predecessors, he euhemerized the Muses in an ambiguous manner, bringing them down to earth even as they were carried up to heaven. Le Franc used his own conception of the Muses to comment on the nature of music and of poetry, as well as to hold forth on women and gender relations. Originally, the Muses were envisioned in Greek mythology as three in number, corresponding to their three functions in creativity - meditation, memory, and song (Melete, Mneme, and Aoede) - or to the three strings of the lyre (Nete, Mese, and Hypate).2 By the time the Muses appeared in Homer and Hesiod, their number was established as nine; in the latter's Theogony, the Muses visited him on Mount Helicon and provided him with the knowledge necessary to become a poet. As the daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne (Memory), they had prophetic strengths and were capable of conferring the poetic gift, and eventually, the Muses were linked with the arts and identified in sculpture by particular iconographic symbols. For example, Clio, the Muse of history, is often depicted with a scroll, an open chest of books, or a cithara; Euterpe, the Muse of lyric poetry and music, is generally seen with some form of flute, which instrument, according to certain legends, she had invented. Thalia, the deity of comedy, normally carries a comic mask, while her sister, the Muse of tragedy, Melpomene, displays a tragic mask and sometimes a club or sword as well; and Erato, the Muse of erotic poetry, normally appears with a lyre. Polymnia, the deity of sacred hymns, is usually represented as a pensive maiden who is sometimes veiled, while Calliope, the Muse of epic poetry and eloquence, wields a writing tablet and stylus. …