Lives of Fair and Gallant Ladies (A. R. Allinson translation)
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User:Jahsonic/thematic summary of Les Vies des Dames Galantes by Brantome
Illustration by Paul-Emile Bécat
I've finished my thematic summary of Les Vies des Dames Galantes by Brantome, probable womanizer and veritable connoisseur of feminine psychology, like the fictional Don Juan and the later actual Giacomo Casanova. Les Vies is the best work of its kind since Ovid, no wonder Freud quoted the work with regards to the lapsus.
Read the full text of the seven discourses here in an A. R. Allinson translation:
- Of Ladies Which Do Make Love, and Their Husbands Cuckolds
- On the Question Which Doth Give the More Content in Love, Whether Touching, Seeing, or Speaking
- Concerning the Beauty of a Fine Leg, and the Virtue the Same Doth Possess
- Concerning Old Dames as Fond to Practise Love as Ever the Young Ones Be
- Telling How Fair and Honourable Ladies Do Love Brave and Valiant Men, and Brave Men Courageous Women
- Of How We Should Never Speak Ill of Ladies, and of the Consequences of So Doing
- Concerning Married Women, Widows and Maids: to Wit, Which of These Same Be Better Than the Other to Love.
Themes include the author as unreliable narrator and gossiper, older women, female infidelity and male cuckolds, chastity belts, a response to antifeminism and misogyny, forced seduction, succubi, Aretino's positions, excitement by visual stimuli by way of paintings, lesbianism, descriptions of the female intimate parts, thirty beauties of a woman, cunnilingus, fetishism, Magdalen's skull, intertextuality, sodomy, hermaphroditism and godemiches.
