Les mots du sexe au coeur de la Querelle des femmes à la Renaissance

Amidst the Querelle des femmes, a series of discourses pertinent to the establishment of gender emerged from the first printing presses, as evidenced by medieval texts such as Les Lamentations de Mathéolus, Les Évangiles des Quenouilles, or Le Champion des dames by Martin Le Franc, and in later 16th-century works such as Drusac’s Les Controverses des sexes Masculin et Femenin, Jehan Du Pré’s Le Palais des nobles dames, François de Billon’s Le Fort inexpugnable de l’honneur du Sexe Femenin and Jean Dagonneau’s La Guerre des Masles contre les femelles. The present study focuses on the words and images used by these misogynist and profeminist authors to refer to the sex of women, which was often confused with the women themselves. In the space between the forbidden and the pleasure of the unspeakable, they depict it as a hidden treasure, a fence threatened by opening, injury or escape, when they do not depict this sex/mouth as an unfathomable abyss and a diabolical trap.