Campbell, Julie D. Women, Entertainment, and Precursors of the French Salon, 1532–1615

Conventional histories of seventeenth-century French salon society trace the movement's beginnings to Catherine de Vivonne's (1599-1665) gatherings of the select précieuses in her chambre bleue at the Hôtel de Rambouillet in Paris.According to these interpretations, the marquise de Rambouillet's chambre bleue was an originary site where the nascent French salon culture, social politesse, and modern novel came to fruition, breaking with outdated traditions and "the barbarousness of the Bourbon court" (66).Julie D. Campbell reminds us of L. Clark Keating's 1941 exemplar study in which he argues that, in his words, "the salon of Mme de Rambouillet was not an outgrowth of, but a protest against, the sixteenth-century society which she saw round about her" (19).Women, Entertainment, and Precursors of the French Salon, 1532-1651 disrupts the established historical metanarratives that maintain the abrupt and reactive "birth" of the seventeenth-century French salon.The volume follows the history of the French salon to the sixteenth-century Valois courts and sodalities of Lyon, Poitiers, and Toulouse that had strong connections to the Italian literary society, unravelling Italianate literary games, court conventions, and humanist salon-style society as the French salon's precursors.Campbell writes that, "while such seventeenth-century groups may have broken with the Bourbon court, there was no perfectly clean break with social practices of the sixteenth-century société mondaine […] it is crucial to remember that such groups […] had rich Italian roots" (19).Campbell uses theories and histories of play, including the works of Johan Huizinga, Eugen Fink, Roger Caillois, and Bernard Suits, to frame the close readings of primary sources related to the sixteenth-century "proto salons, " including manuscript albums, printed texts, and the writings of Estienne Pasquier (1529-1615).Given that Pasquier was involved in proto-salon culture and the circles of the Dames des Roches, Madeleine (c.1520-87) and Catherine (1542-87), and Marguerite de Valois (1553-1615), Campbell uses Pasquier's copious letters, poetry, and texts as a ficelle (a string) between play and culture, specifying Pasquier as the eyewitness of the shaping of early salon-style entertainment (22).

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