Talk:Louise Labé

message: * Just today there were a bunch of changes to this article to basically rewrite the article in line with the Huchon hypothesis: A rewrite of the lede paragraph describing Labé as fictitious, quotes on the "biography" head ("Biography of 'Louise Labé'"), and commentary that the hypothesis is "now generally accepted".  Questions: 
:* Accepted by whom?  So far as I know it is still in contention. The lede paragraph of the biography should not be changed at this point. To make this assertion there would need to be third-party publications acknowledging that it is "generally accepted", and since it's controversial and overturning a lot of received scholarship, there would need to be multiple such citations.  --lquilter 18:01, 13 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: * I've edited the lede paragraph back to include both the biographical info & the Huchon hypothesis. --lquilter 18:05, 13 February 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Huchon hypothesis

message: 1) Daughter of Charly and wife of Perrin, the name Labé comes (one way or another-see below) from the rope-making factory which her father and (as far as I can discern) also her husband later owned and ran. (Or was it her brother who inherited it from her father, I'm not too sure.)
2) Her father is described as a wealthy or rich 'ropemaker' in the few English sources I have looked at but I would suggest it is the wrong word. Even qualified by 'rich', 'ropemaker' might suggest to most readers a semi-skilled profession possibly carried out in the home, a sort of cottage industry. Her father was a member of the Lyon establishment and the rope-making factory he owned had a significance something like that of a modern steelworks.  Just as 'rope baron' would be too grand for the father, 'ropemaker' even qualified by 'rich' seems too modest. I favor 'rope manufacturer' or 'rope merchant.'
3) As far as I can tell, 'the beautiful ropemaker' is an incorrect and potentially confusing translation. There is debate as to whether Louise Labé provided paid-for sex; in any case she never made rope for a living and she was never boss of a rope factory. Before the beginnings of equal oportunities for women in France, identifying a woman using a job title simply revealed the profession of her husband or father. For example, 'La Notaire' was 'the sollicitor's wife' and not 'the (female) sollicitor.' So 'La Belle Cordière' =  'the beautiful rope-manufacturer's daughter' or, later, 'wife,' 'widow'.
-   -   -   -  - - - - -  Notes on the above:
The source for my first point is the Budini 'Notice' available through Siefar.org. To find it, click on 'debates' and follow the link to the page on Louise Labe ('Louise Labé attaquée!') His contribution is found by following link number 24, (Paolo Budini,extrait de la notice biographique traduite de l’italien, parue dans L’Opera di Louise Labé Lionese, éd. et trad. P. Budini, numéro spécial de la revue In forma di parole (Bologna), XXIX année, n° I, janvier-mars 2009, 202 p.) It is the most recent contribution to the Siefar debate. See section 4 (pages 4-5) and page 6 (section 6) for information on her husband and her parents.
yours provisionally 01:48, 16 April 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: For what it's worth, Steven Roger Fischer in A History of Reading (Reaktion Books, London, 2003, ) says on page 235 that "eventually she married a middle-aged, wealthy Lyonnais ropemaker, with whom she was apparently very happy, but then dedicated herself wholly to literary pursuits ..." Whiteghost.ink (talk) 02:38, 14 January 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  Three points on details 

message: If your follow all the freely-accessible links on Siefar you'll see that:
the last contribution was in 2010 or 2011 if you count something from 2008 that was republished;
among the contributions collected here, the hypothesis was first received with a mixture of annoyance, incredulity and ridicule/amusement. Conspiracy theories attributing her work to male authors were not new, but nor were they serious. It is a very old game, claiming a sensational scoop about Louise Labé. The archivists have an ironic attitude at the many researchers who still come to investigate the archives looking for a sensational piece of evidence. The majority of the historical documents mentioning or possibly mentioning Louise are printed in one of the affordable student editions of the works, and with the internet, any reader can quite easily access all the sources that Mireille Huchon had access to. (Huchon relies on no new evidence, just controversial, semi-new interpretations). There is simply nothing unknown to be discovered in the archives, hence the archivists amusement.
The hypothesis soon received a different status after Fumaroli wrote his article, and the tone of Huchon's critics generally became more cautious. As for Fumaroli: Huchon was incidental to the point he makes in the article, and it is hard to maintain that he was in a position to make an informed judgement that Huchon's theory was plausible. Had he read her book? He seems far more to be "taking her word for it". In writing Exista-t-il à Lyon une Louise Labé qui n’a pas laissé d’autres traces littéraires que le petit recueil de 1545 et les jeux de mots (...) auxquels ce nom se prêtait ? he shows himself to be unfamilar with the relevant biographical documents, apparently ignoring material such as her will. It was, like I say, a journalistic article about whether we should value "authenticity" and how the reader should approach "the author", be it Proust, Ronsard or "Labé", -- and for the purposes of this debate should not be understood as anything more than an uncritical backing of a book he was not in a position to evaluate.
 
Amongst the noteworthy contributions collected on Siefar, a couple or so agree with Fumaroli in considering that in the book Huchon has sufficiently proved her case. Other contributors raise considerable doubts, arguing that textual analysis points to the works of Labé to be uniform and very different from those of the supposed authors of this hoax. (You don't actually need to be a "professor" to notice that -- hence the ricicule that was still found in some post-Fumaroli contributions.)
There are several thoughtful contributions which consider that Huchon has raised some very valid and difficult questions that future scholars will have to answer, but all of this group find that the later part of the book contains major shortcomings in methodology and reasoning. A typical conclusion from a member of this group is that "thanks to Huchon's shining a new light on the biographical evidence, we can no longer believe that Labé is the author of these texts, but Huchon's claims to have found the true authors rely on fanciful and unconvincing interpretantions of the texts. She has been better at disproving than proving." 
In the most comprehensive and apparently final entry, Budini surveys all the available biographical evidence. He basically validates the first response to the book, that of Claude Duneton in the ABSOLUTELY hilarious article (it is more amused than outraged, and very witty, playful) http://www.siefar.org/debats-articles/c-duneton-figaro-litteraire.html?var_mode=calcul but in marginally more polite terms. ("Marginally more polite"--Budini makes no pretense of having any esteem for her book). He sets out all the evidence at length, --necessarily including all the evidence that Huchon had used in her book -- and shows that, however unclear the picture of Labé that emerges down the ages, we not only have more information about her than about several of her contemporary poets for whom we do not for example have a date of birth. It requires a puzzlingly capricious interpretation of what is and what is not "reliable evidence" to find any support for a hypothesis that questions the status of Labé as the author. Rather than looking insightfully at evidence that had long been followed too naively, --as the group above believed her to have done -- it was argued that on closer inspection Huchon's analysis of the biographical information is simply far less reliable than the work of previous scholars who she seems to oddly sideline. For one, the theory meets significant difficulties when we are asked to imagine whether two very serious and respectable people, the noblewoman to whom the book is dedicated and the royal official who granted permission for the publishing -- a serious business indeed-- were also part of this "delightful hoax", this exhuberant intellectual game. Why did neither the educated upper-middle class woman daughter-of-Charly-and-wife-of-Perrin known as Louise Labé, nor the noblewoman, both victims of this disreputable hoax, speak out? And, as many have argued, the one thing that a person is likely to do after perpetuating an extremely clever hoax is boast about it. How, in such a "garullous and quarrellous" group of writers as those who perpetuated "the hoax which tops all others that went before it", do we find no overt mention of it? It emerges from Budini's 13 page text that rather than being considered a worthwhile contribution to scholarship, Huchon's book arguably fits better into the long history of myths and fantasies about Lousie Labé produced from the imaginations of various novelists, biographers, -- or, in the case of Huchon, a highly-esteemed scholar, -- whose speculations have, over the centuries, periodically excited and delighted certain readers, including the esteemed Marc Fumaroli.
I would conclude that the Huchon hypothesis can quite perfectly be described as an improbable conspiracy theory and, as with the question of Shakespeare's "debated" authorship, there is no legitimate debate. Which is not to say that no academics accept the theory.
I actually got quite far in providing the page numbers, paragraph numbers for the references to the over-a-dozen sources, translating some of the key quotes. But to lend the authority that footnotes and quotes would provide to what I write, and to paraphrase everything for English-only editors, my text would have to be made up approximately 3/4 of quotes.
Many thanks. From the contributor who previouly signed as "yours provisionally" 77.98.32.90 (talk) 22:12, 2 November 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  The Huchon debate as seen through the contributions to Siefar 

message: may be the last of my contributions, I've already done more than I expected. I felt I had to come back to quote my sources. As you'll see, it is chiefly everything on Siefar up to 24, and notes and introductions from Oeuvres complètes présentation par François Rigolot, Flammarion, 2004, Paris. (1st edition 1986) and Oeuvres poétiques / Louise Labé. précédées des Rymes de Pernette Du Guillet. avec une sélection de Blasons du corps féminin / édition présentée, établie et annotée par Françoise Charpentier. Gallimard, 1983
I've scanned the other two contributions for Siefar: they seem very good but don't change anything. 25, Michel Jourde, « Louise Labé, deux ou trois choses que je sais d’elle », Cultures et société en Rhône-Alpes, n°2, avril-mai-juin 2008, p. 74-78 ; rééd. en ligne sur le site de Transitions,rubrique "Republications", n°2, 2011, is very good for explaining that she did not only publish, but publish with Royal Priviledge, something rare and hard to obtain, and no doubt impossible if you didn't write the book (or did not exist). 
So I no doubt repeated myself, I'm sure it can be improved, but I don't see how my contributions could become en masse a candidate for removal. None of it is "made up", none is "original research" !!!
77.98.32.90 (talk)   — Preceding undated comment added 15:09, 6 December 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  my latest edits 

message: It is better than my work, could easily have been written by a professional academic. You find these arguments in publications. I removed it because my view is, this would belong on a wikipedia page dedicated to Huchon's book.
"However, other critics do not concur with Huchon's view. First, her theory, although intriguing, remains speculative; she reinterprets existing historical documents, rather than citing new evidence. Second, Labe's corpus does contain verbal echoes of works by Sceve and other writers in his circle. These echoes, typical of Renaissance practices of intertextuality, indicate that Labe collaborated and interacted with her poetic contemporaries, but they do not necessarily indicate that her contemporaries went so far as to ghost-write her works. Finally, a unique stylistic voice and a remarkable consistency of vocabulary and themes are found throughout all of Labe's different texts, a phenomenon that renders it unlikely that the texts were composed by more than one person."
77.98.32.90 (talk)   — Preceding undated comment added 15:19, 6 December 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  explaining something I removed earlier 

message: Hello fellow Wikipedians,
I have just modified 8 external links on Louise Labé. Please take a moment to review my edit. If you have any questions, or need the bot to ignore the links, or the page altogether, please visit this simple FaQ for additional information. I made the following changes:
*Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20061129105135/http://www.siefar.org/ActuSIEFAR-Labe.html to http://www.siefar.org/ActuSIEFAR-Labe.html
*Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20070206163326/http://www.siefar.org/RessourcesEtudes/Buron-Louise-Labe.pdf to http://www.siefar.org/RessourcesEtudes/Buron-Louise-Labe.pdf
*Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20061129105135/http://www.siefar.org/ActuSIEFAR-Labe.html to http://www.siefar.org/ActuSIEFAR-Labe.html
*Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20061129105135/http://www.siefar.org/ActuSIEFAR-Labe.html to http://www.siefar.org/ActuSIEFAR-Labe.html
*Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20070614130326/http://www.siefar.org/RessourcesEtudes/Martin-Louise-Labe.pdf to http://www.siefar.org/RessourcesEtudes/Martin-Louise-Labe.pdf
*Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20061129105135/http://www.siefar.org/ActuSIEFAR-Labe.html to http://www.siefar.org/ActuSIEFAR-Labe.html
*Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20060114174208/http://www.biblioweb.org/-LABE-Louise-.html to http://www.biblioweb.org/-LABE-Louise-.html
*Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20110927075158/http://home.infionline.net/~ddisse/labe.html to http://home.infionline.net/~ddisse/labe.html
When you have finished reviewing my changes, you may follow the instructions on the template below to fix any issues with the URLs.
Cheers.—InternetArchiveBot (Report bug) 14:08, 28 November 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  External links modified 

message: Hello fellow Wikipedians,
I have just modified 2 external links on Louise Labé. Please take a moment to review my edit. If you have any questions, or need the bot to ignore the links, or the page altogether, please visit this simple FaQ for additional information. I made the following changes:
*Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20061129105135/http://www.siefar.org/ActuSIEFAR-Labe.html to http://www.siefar.org/ActuSIEFAR-Labe.html
*Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20061129105135/http://www.siefar.org/ActuSIEFAR-Labe.html to http://www.siefar.org/ActuSIEFAR-Labe.html
When you have finished reviewing my changes, you may follow the instructions on the template below to fix any issues with the URLs.
Cheers.—InternetArchiveBot (Report bug) 09:05, 7 December 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  External links modified