Louise Labe

Louise Labé, (c. 1520 or 1522, Lyon – April 25, 1566, Parcieux), also identified as La Belle Cordière, (The Beautiful Ropemaker), was a female French poet of the Renaissance, born at Lyon, the daughter of a rich ropemaker, Pierre Charly, and his second wife, Etiennette Roybet.

Louise Labe was born in the early 1520s to a prosperous rope-maker, a member of the Lyon bourgeoisie. Her mother died when Labe was a child; her father had her educated in languages as well as in music, and she tells us that she also learned to ride and fence. She was married in her early 20s to another rope-maker, some 30 years older than she. It was apparently after her marriage that she began to participate in the literary circles of Lyon, which at the time challenged Paris as a cosmopolitan center and which allowed the bourgeoisie greater participation in cultural life than did the capital.

In 1555 Euvres de Louize Labe Lionnoize was published in Lyon: it contained a prose dedicatory epistle to a local noblewoman, a prose Debat de Folie et d'Amour, 24 sonnets (the first in Italian), and three elegies; the work concluded with 24 poems by other writers, praising Labe's ability. The book was popular enough that three other editions came out within a year (the first "revues et corrigees par la dite Dame"), and it was widely-read enough to bring both praise from beyond Lyon and criticism for being immodest and "unwomanly."

Sometime after 1556, Labe apparently left Lyon to live in the countryside. Her husband died in the early 1560s and she died, perhaps of the plague, in 1566.