Down to Earth and Up to Heaven: The Nine Muses in Martin Le Franc's Le Champion des Dames

Summary

The Champion of Ladies (1440–42) by Martin Le Franc represents the most extensive defense of women (24,336 octosyllabic verses) within a long series of vernacular works in prose and poetry comprising the corpus of La Querelle des Femmes, which took place during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in France.1 In the Champion of Ladies, an allegorical response to classical and contemporary misogynous attacks on women, Le Franc employed a poetic form composed of octaves (huitains) of octosyllabic verses rhyming ababbcbc and a debate structure which created not only narrative tension but a diegetic reality similar to the extra-diegetic one of the historical Querelle des Femmes. In each of the work's five books, the allegorical Champion of Ladies, known as Franc Vouloir or Free Will, presented arguments answering the challenges raised by the five allegorical henchmen of his misogynous opponent Malebouche or Badmouth: Brief Conseil or Hasty Judgment (Book I); Vilain Penser or Evil Thinking (Book II); Trop Cuidier or Much Presuming (Book III); Lourd Entendement or Slow Wit (Book IV); and Faulx Semblant or Seeming False (Book V). Each of these five personifications reflects a specific negative attribute of women. Book IV is particularly illustrative of the author's championship in defense of ladies, because in that book Free Will adduces various women to support his arguments against Lourd Entendement or Slow Wit; these ladies include intriguing figures such as Le Franc's near contemporaries Christine de Pizan and Joan of Arc; the notorious Popess Joan; and women long regarded as allegorical figures — namely, the Nine Muses.