Abstract

Praise and blame are the two currents that wend their way through writings about women from antiquity to modern times. Is woman Eve or Mary, “virtue or venom”? This unresolvable question gave rise to a debate structure that governs many texts dealing with women. Indeed, as Monique Engel observed, this structure points to an ideological impasse, a fundamental contradiction within Christian doctrine on women and marriage. One late-fourteenth-century writer who inscribes himself into this structure is Jean le Fèvre de Ressons, who translated the Lamentations by the misogynist Matheolus and wrote its counterpart, the Livre de Leesce which he designed as a refutation of Matheolus. The Livre de Leesce forms part of the tradition of the praise of women, represented in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries by such texts as Chaucer's Legend of Good Women, Christine de Pizan's Epistre au dieu d'amours and Le livre de la cité des dames, and Martin le Franc's Champion des dames