Open AccessOn Reading <i>La Puce de Madame Des-Roches</i>: Catherine des Roches's <i>Responces</i> (1583)
Author(s) -
Anne R. Larsen
Publication year - 1998
Publication title -
renaissance and reformation
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.1
H-Index - 5
eISSN - 2293-7374
pISSN - 0034-429X
DOI - 10.33137/rr.v34i2.10835
Subject(s) - contest , art , poetry , humanities , reading (process) , literature , philosophy , theology , linguistics
Catherine des Roches's authorial participation in the famous poetic flea contest during the Grands Jours of Poitiers in 1579 was all but forgotten a decade and a half after her death when Estienne Pasquier claimed the volume of La Puce de Madame Des-Roches as his own by eliminating her name from the title in his collective work La jeunesse d'Estienne Pasquier (1610). As if sensing such a fate and wishing above all to remind her readers of her literary contribution to the contest, Catherine des Roches published her flea poems as responces in her Secondes oeuvres (1583). This study proposes several possible reasons for her inclusion of these replies in her second volume of collected works.