Renaissance Women in Marguerite Yourcenar's 'L'Œuvre au Noir'

This paper reflects on issues of gender in Renaissance scholarship, through the rather indirect means of one modern French novelist's characterisation of one female in one of her novels. The writer is Marguerite Yourcenar. The novel is her last, published in 1968, 'L'Œuvre au Noir'. The character is Hilzonde Ligre, mother of the central (and male) character of the novel, Zénon, alchemist, physician, philosopher and seeker after truth. Marguerite Yourcenar died in 1987 in her mid eighties after a career distinguished, among other things, by her election in 1981 to the French Academy. It is an extraordinary fact that she was the first and so far, only woman, to have been awarded this distinction in three and a half centuries of the Academy's existence. The novel 'L'Œuvre au Noir' is set amid the religious and philosophical turmoil of the sixteenth century. The novel finishes with Zénon committing suicide in a Bruges prison, just a week before his 59th birthday, as an alternative either to being burnt at the stake for writings judged heretical, or to recanting. Hilzonde gives birth to Zénon out of wedlock. His father is a brilliant young Italian churchman of noble birth, Alberico de' Numi, himself a fascinating mixture of traits culled from the history and literature of the time. Yourcenar has him plausibly frequenting such figures as Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo and playing a role in major events of the epoch. Similarly Zénon and his researches are derived in large part from authentic and conspicuous figures of the time, for example, the alchemist Paracelsus, the physician Michael Servetus, executed for heresy, the great French surgeon Ambroise Paré, Leonardo and the hermetic philosophers Giordano Bruno and Campanella.