Jeanne Flore. Tales and Trials of Love: a bilingual edition and study. Edited and translated by Kelly Digby Peebles. Poetry translated by Marta Rijn Finch. (Toronto: CRRS/Iter, 2014). http://crrs.ca/publications/ov33/
In Tales and Trials of Love, Jeanne Flore (whose identity remains a mystery) depicts an ideal notion of love as a mutually beneficial relationship upheld in a world governed by Venus and Cupid. Jeanne Flore urges her readers—and the characters within the tales—to aspire to achieve and vindicate their right to attain mutual love. These seven tales illustrate various obstacles to that ideal and the consequences of denouncing Cupid’s sovereignty. This first bilingual edition situates these tales within the vibrant cultural context of Renaissance Lyon and demonstrates how they respond to contemporary literary conversations, including the querelle des Amyes, works that considered the role of love in a woman’s life, and Christian humanism, an early movement to reform the Catholic Church from within.
Kelly Peebles’s excellent translation and edition of Jeanne Flore’s Comptes amoureux / Tales and Trials of Love (Lyon, 1542) puts Flore back on the map of important French female authors, both for English-speaking readers and for scholars interested more broadly in early modern French print culture. READ MORE
