Noted classical scholar, patron, and French poet of
Berry
As a writer, a protector of humanists, and a muse, Jeanne de la Font was to Berry what Anne Begat was to Burgundy and Louise Labe to Lyons. With her French verse adaptation of Boccaccio’s Teseida (which has mysteriously disappeared), she has been acclaimed by her contemporaries as a poet surpassing Sappho and whose talent has revealed that French women were capable of resurrecting the grandeur of Latin epic poetry. She may have given Queen Claude de France, Francis I’s first wife, the idea to ask Anne de Graville to rewrite for her another French version inspired by the same Italian masterpiece.
In 1521, Jeanne, the only child of Jean de la Font (d. 1505) and Franjoise Godard of Bourges, married Jacques Thiboust (1492— 1555), notary and secretary to Francis I and author of a few administrative, literary, and devotional compositions. When the king of France gave the province of Berry to his sister, Marguerite de Navarre (Marguerite d’Angouleme), she took over his secretary as her own and arranged his marriage with Jeanne de la Font. The city of Bourges had been a religious center for over twenty years, thanks to the patronage of Jeanne de France (d. 1505), the daughter of Louis XI and repudiated wife of Louis XII, who had founded there Sainte-Marie’s College and the Monastery of the Annonciade. With the help of the future queen of Navarre, Bourges became, like Paris and Lyons, a cultural center open to political and commercial ties with Italy. Although Marguerite did not reside often in Bourges, she attracted many humanists to the city in the 1520s on account of the renowned professors she appointed at the university. It is in this intellectual climate that Jeanne de la Font and Jacques Thiboust held a cenacle frequented by famous Neolatin and French poets like Jean Second, Franjois Habert, Clement Marot, Charles Fontaine, Nicolas de Bourbon, Jean Milon, and Jean Salomon, who dedicated important literary and scientific works to the royal secretary or to his wife.
At her untimely death, Jeanne de la Font was celebrated in Greek, Latin, and French verse as a woman of great learning who knew all the secrets of French poetry. After Jacques died in 1555, Jacqueline, Jeanne, and Marie Thiboust, the couple’s three surviving daughters (out of five children), continued their parents’ patronage and literary salon. Jacqueline, born in 1524, had married Pierre Sarde in 1545, a lawyer and counselor who took over his father-in-law’s function as secretary of the king. Her sister Jeanne married Jean Du Moulin, another local official. These learned daughters were celebrated by Franjois Habert in his French epistles just as their mother had been by Jean Second in his Latin elegies. Such panegyric works give witness to these women’s social and cultural importance in the province of Berry and show the high regard humanists had of their scientific knowledge, their language training, and their poetic performance.
Catherine M. Muller
See also Claude de France; Graville, Anne de;
Labe, Louise; Marguerite de Navarre.
Bibliography
Primary Work
Second, Jean. loannis Nicolaii Hagani Opera Omnia, emendatius et cum notis adhuc ineditis Petri Bur-manni Secundi, denuo edita cura Petri Bosscha. 2 vols. Leiden: S. et J. Luchtmans, 1821.
Secondary Works
Boyer, Hippolyte. Un menage litteraire en Berry au XVIe siecle. (Jacques Thiboust et Jeanne de La
Font). Bourges: Impr. de la Veuve Jollet-Sou-chois, 1859.
MuUer, Catherine M. “Jeanne de la Font et Anne de Graville, translatrices de la These'ide de Boccace au XVIe siecle.” Les Femmes et traduction du Moyen Age au XVIIIe siecle. Edited by Jean-Philippe Beaulieu. Montreal: Presses de l’Universite d’Ottawa, 2004.
World History
