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A Seventeenth-Century French Woman Poet: Gendered Literary Voices, Love, Illness, and Identity

926J Madeleine de La Calprenède (1618-1668)

Les Œuvres diverses tant en Vers qu’en Proses; dediees a Madame de Mattignon par Octavie.

A Paris, chez Jacques Le Gras, à l’entrée de la gallerie des Prisonniers. M. DC. LVIII. Avec privilege du Roy. 1658                                                   .                                                      Price $3,800

Duodecimo: 13x 7.5cm. signatures: ã⁴, A-E¹², F¹⁰, G¹¹ (lacking G¹²) (Bound without a leaf of privilege, apparently as usual (cf Berès). First and only edition. This copy is bound in 18th century calf with gilt spine and label ; some pale damp staining.

First and only edition of this exceptionally uncommon collection of seventeenth-century French poetry, published under the literary name Octavie and attributed to Madeleine de La Calprenède, née de Lyée. The volume brings together approximately fifty-nine compositions in verse and prose, including sonnets, odes, elegies, occasional poems, and literary correspondence. Dedicated to Madame de Matignon, it belongs to the world of seventeenth-century French salon literature, in which poetry, personal relationships, literary invention, and questions of identity were closely intertwined.

In this collection there are depictions of masculine and feminine literary personae. Published under the female name Octavie, the volume introduces the masculine figure Lucidor, notably in Le généreux Lucidor (p. 62) and Lettre burlesque de Lucidor (p. 136). These figures appear alongside a wider literary circle that includes Clarice, Acanthe, Lysie, Clorimant, and others. The collection thus presents a complex arrangement of gendered voices, imagined relationships, and literary identities, rather than a single, stable autobiographical speaker.

This interplay between masculine and feminine literary identities makes the collection particularly relevant to the history of gender expression and cross-gender literary performance. The relationship between Octavie and Lucidor invites consideration of how a seventeenth-century woman writer could construct and inhabit different gendered perspectives within the conventions of amorous poetry. Although the precise authorship and speaking positions of individual compositions require further investigation, the volume offers valuable material for scholars studying the historical representation and performance of gender, including questions central to contemporary gender and trans studies.

Equally interesting are the poems concerning physical illness and medical treatment. Sonnet à la petite vérole pour Octavie (p. 56) and Sonnet à Cléonime pendant cette maladie (p. 57) concern smallpox, while Bouts rimez par Octavie sur une seignée (p. 133) and another poem on bloodletting (p. 134) address the experience of therapeutic bleeding. These compositions place bodily vulnerability, disease, and medical intervention within the conventions of literary expression. They are particularly interesting for the history of women’s writing about illness and the body in early modern France.

Among the titles are La jeune Gervaise, à la fameuse Octavie (p. 50), Sonnet à Octavie, sur sa guérison (p. 59), Élégie à Octavie le jour de sa fête (p. 120), and Stances pour Clarice (p. 167). The appearance of poems addressed to Octavie, alongside poems attributed to her and others associated with named literary figures, suggests a sophisticated literary environment in which authorship, performance, and personal identity were deliberately interwoven.

An early manuscript bibliographical annotation on the front flyleaf provides additional evidence of the book’s recognized rarity. The note reads, apparently, “Poësies rares. Elles ne sont pas dans le Catalogue de Nicolas de Bure.” (“Rare poems. They are not in Nicolas de Bure’s catalogue.”) The reference presumably concerns a member of the celebrated De Bure family of Parisian booksellers and bibliographers. Although the precise catalogue intended has not been identified, the inscription records an earlier owner’s or bookseller’s recognition of the collection’s scarcity and an attempt to establish its bibliographical standing.

The work survives in very few examples.  OCLC records only one copy in the United States (Library of Congress) and a small handful in European holdings (BnF, Arsenal, Bodleian). Absent from Cioranescu’s listings of later seventeenth-century women poets and long overlooked in discussions of early modern “préciosité,” it represents one of the earliest independent poetic collections by a French woman outside court patronage.

Through the alternating voices of Octavie and Lucidor, La Calprenède constructs a poetic dialogue that frequently unsettles conventional distinctions between male and female speakers. The result is a work that belongs simultaneously to the culture of the salon, the history of women’s authorship, and the broader tradition of early modern experiments with literary identity.

Bibliographical references: Cf. Berès, Livres de femmes; Frédéric Lachèvre, bibliographical studies of seventeenth-century French poetry; Cioranescu. Attribution of the collection to Madeleine de La Calprenède has been discussed in the bibliographical literature, with Suzanne de Nervèze also proposed. Individual contributions and their authorship merit further examination

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