She Knew Better than Any Man: Female Lovers in Brantôme’s Courtly Chronicles
“This reminds me of certain women who love their companions so dearly that they would not share them for all the wealth in the world—jealous as a beggar with his drinking barrel.”
— Pierre de Bourdeille, Seigneur de Brantôme, Les Dames Galantes (c. 1600, written in the 1580s but published posthumously)Pierre de Bourdeille, known as Brantôme, was a courtier, soldier, and chronicler of scandalous tales. In Les Dames Galantes – his racy collection of anecdotes about the love lives of noblewomen – he included several stories of sapphic desire, told with voyeuristic intrigue but also surprising frankness and a kind of amused admiration.
Though Brantôme was hardly a feminist, he preserved some of the earliest European prose descriptions of romantic and erotic love between women, drawn from the courts of Catherine de’ Medici and Marguerite de Valois. His portraits of these women – often aristocratic, literate, and unapologetically sensual – reveal a social world where same-sex relationships, though officially taboo, were known, whispered about, and even at times admired for their elegance and secrecy.
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