Poet and Dominican nun
In all likelihood, Anne de Marquets was born in Marques near Eu in Normandy, into a family of the provincial nobility, and was sent at an early age to the priory of Saint-Louis in Poissy where she would spend the rest of her life. Saint-Louis was a royal foundation dating from 1304; it received primarily noblewomen and had a magnificent church, conventual buildings, and generous sources of revenue. The sisters thus enjoyed considerable material wellbeing, and, while certain aspects of their communal life were not wholly in accord with the spirit of monasticism, they were conducive to writing: the priory remained, for example, relatively open to the outside world; evidence also shows that many nuns were able to retain private incomes and property. At the priory school, Marquets received a solid cultural formation, apparently influenced by humanist tenets, studying Latin and probably some Greek. She would later teach in the school herself, earning the gratitude of a younger generation of women.
Marquets’s first collection of poetry, Sonets, prieres et devises (Sonnets, Prayers, and Mottoes), was written in response to the Colloquy of Poissy (1561) that, at the instigation of Charles IX and Catherine de Medicis, brought together representatives of the Catholic and Protestant churches in the hope of effecting a reconciliation. This intervention by a woman in the domain of religious polemic was highly unusual: on the one hand, a Protestant riposte was drafted; on the other hand, the Catholic hierarchy arranged for the publication of Marquets’s work, a crucial role in this process being almost certainly played by the noted theologian Claude d’Espence. Both d’Espence and Marguerite de Valois, who was also present at the colloquy, encouraged Marquets to continue writing, and her second major collection of verse, Les Divines Poesies de Marc Antoine Flaminius (The Sacred Poems of Marcantonio Flaminio), appeared a few years later. The translation of the Neolatin poet’s De rebus divinis carmina (1550) is followed by a series of original compositions that accounts for the larger part of the volume.
Over the last twenty years of her life, Mar-quets composed her most substantial work, the Sonets spirituels (Spiritual Sonnets), published seventeen years after her death by Marie de Fortia, a fellow nun and former pupil of the poet. The four hundred and eighty sonnets lead the reader through the Sundays and feast days of the liturgical year; meditative and didactic in tone, they draw heavily on traditional religious and devotional texts, such as the Divine Office, the Bible, and the Golden Legend. Marrying the aesthetic possibilities of the lyric cycle with those of the liturgical cycle, the collection constitutes nothing less than a canzoniere divino, of a scope, richness, and unity unparalleled in the devotional poetry of the time. Nor does the spiritual nature of the collection prevent Mar-quets from intervening in some of the major debates of the day, such as the Reformation and the querelle des femmes. While the theological ideas and the “feminism” expressed in the Sonets spirituels are, in general, moderate and irenic, Marquets also defends both the Catholic church and women and has sharp criticism for their detractors. In addition, the sonnets present a number of characteristics that contribute to what is generally termed the “feminization” of devotion and that invite analysis in terms of gender: the use of images having to do with motherhood, child rearing, or the home; the valorization of female exemplars (women saints and biblical characters); the textual elaboration of a female community; the emphasis placed on qualities traditionally gendered as feminine (humility, patience, obedience, tenderness, compassion, pity, and so on).
Marquets was thus one of the key women writers of devotional and religious poetry of the second half of the sixteenth century in France. Appreciated in her own time, her poetry continues to attract readers interested in studying the modulations of a woman’s poetic voice notable for the originality and diversity of its production as well as for its social and religious engagement.
Gary Ferguson
See also Convents; Education, Humanism, and Women; Literary Culture and Women; Marguerite de Valois; Religious Reform and Women; Querelle des Femmes.
Bibliography
Primary Works
Ferguson, Gary, ed. Sonets spirituels. . . sur les di-manches et principales solennitez de l’annee (Spiritual Sonnets. . . on the Sundays and Principal Solemnities of the Year). Geneva: Droz, 1997. (Originally published in Paris: Claude Morel, 1605.)
Marquets, Anne de. Les Divines Poesies de Marc Antoine Flaminius (The Sacred Poems of Marcantonio Flaminio). Paris: Nicolas Chesneau, 1568.
Marquets, Anne de. Sonets, prieres et devises en forme de pasquins, pour l’assemblee de Messieurs les Prelats et Docteurs, tenue d Poissy, M. D.LXI (Sonnets, Prayers, and Mottoes in the Form of Pasquills for the Assembly of Prelates and Doctors held in Poissy, 1561). Edited by Andre Gendre. Biblio-theque d’Humanisme et Renaissance 62 (2000): 317-357. (Originally published in Paris: Guillaume Morel, 1562.)
Secondary Works
Ferguson, Gary.“Rules for Writing:The ‘Dames de Poissey.’” In Early Modern Convent Voices:The World and the Cloister Edited by Thomas M. Carr, Jr. EMF: Studies on Early Modern France 11 (forthcoming).
Ferguson, Gary.“The Feminisation of Devotion: Gabrielle de Coignard, Anne de Marquets, and Francois de Sales.” In Women’s Writing in the French Renaissance: Proceedings of the Fifth Cambridge French Renaissance Colloquium, 1—9 July 1997. Edited by Philip Ford and Gillian Jon-dorf, 187—206. Cambridge: Cambridge French Colloquia, 1999.
Fournier, Hannah S. “La Voix textuelle des Sonets spirituels d’Anne de Marquets.” Etudes litteraires 20 (1987):77—92.
Seiler, Mary Hilarine. Anne de Marquets, poetesse re-ligieuse du XVI'e siecle. Washington DC:
Catholic University of America, 1931; New York:AMS Press, 1969.
World History
