Estelle Doudet – Capturing the Present in Northwestern Europe (1348

03/04/202603/04/2026

Gem : Allegorising a Homeland in Its Present Moment: Switzerland after 1648

Article by Estelle Doudet

Helvetia standing above an Alpine landscape where William Tell takes aim at his son.
Johann Caspar Weissenbach, Eydgnoßsisches Contrafeth Auff- uund Abnemmender Jungfrawen Helvetiae. Von denn Edlen Ehrenvesten Vornehmen, Vorsichtigen unnd Weisen Herren, Herren gesambter Burgerschafft Löbl. Statt Zug, durch offentliche Exhibition den 14. und 15. Sept. Anno 1672, Zug, Jacob Ammon, 1673. Engraving by Conrad Meyer. Bayerische Staatsbibliothek München, P.o.germ. 1567 o, p. 3, urn:nbn:de:bvb:12-bsb10122955-0.

Between 1350 and 1650, many European polities devised new ways of representing their homeland. Allegorical figures such as Dame France, Helvetia, and others embodied how elites imagined their contemporary regimes, circulating widely through texts, images, songs, and performances. To date, scholarship has concentrated primarily on two aspects. First, the origins of the phenomenon: the renewed humanist interest in ancient political prosopopoeiae (Roma being a prime example) was almost certainly one of its drivers around 1400. Second, research has focused on the period of its greatest expansion: the global success of political allegories in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is inseparable from the age of nationalisms. Investigations have also converged on a question prompted by the troubling status attributed to these allegories: why did communities of citizens, until very recently defined as exclusively male, choose to capture their political identity in female figures?

Thanks to gender‑studies methodologies, it has become clear that this paradox was not a paradox at all. Addressing politically active subjects, personifications of homeland and sovereignty presuppose a heteronormative male gaze (Yuval-Davis, 1997). To engage this gaze, they perform socially codified feminine roles, mother, wife, daughter, naturalised through their bodies and behaviour. Far from being decorative, these gendered scripts seek to activate communities of emotion grounded in filial attachment, in the desire for possession, but also in the indignation and shame aroused by violations of family values.

This short piece, which synthesises two forthcoming publications, examines a more specific question that has so far attracted little attention: how, in the same period, within the same work, can a single national allegory shift its mode of femininity in response to differing perceptions of the country’s present condition? My case study is Johan Caspar Weissenbach’s Eydgnoßsisches Contrafeth Auff- uund Abnemmender Jungfrawen Helvetiae (Confederate Representation of the Rise and Fall of the Maiden Helvetia). This drama is generally regarded as the most prominent political spectacle of the Swiss Counter-Reformation. Performed in September 1672 by the inhabitants of the Catholic canton of Zug, it was published the following year in a volume illustrated by the celebrated Reformed engraver Conrad Meyer. The Contrafeth is also reputed to be the first work to embody the Swiss Confederation in the allegorical figure of Helvetia. Yet while Weissenbach’s play stages Mutter Helvetia, the accompanying engraving by Meyer depicts Jungfrau Helvetia. What understandings of the Confederation’s political present did these divergent representational conventions seek to promote?

Maternal Outcry in a Disrupted Present

In his play, Weissenbach places the allegory Helvetia at the centre of a relational framework dominated by male figures. In Act I, she expresses deference towards the founding heroes of Switzerland’s past; in Act V, she receives support from Bruder Klaus (Saint Nicholas of Flüe) in order to obtain from God the future restoration of her former greatness. At the same time, the Mutter exercises both empathetic and reproving authority over the thirteen cantons, her “liebste Kinder, liebste Glieder” (her dearest children and members, IV, 9, 194), whom she holds responsible for the recent risks of disunion and decline threatening the Swiss alliance.

The bipartite structure of the play (“Auff- uund Abnemmend”, elevation and fall) thus makes the opposition between past and present starkly visible. A glorious past rooted in freedom and armed resistance: in Act I, the allegory praises Tell’s legendary struggle for independence; in Act II, the Confederates’ victories in the Burgundian Wars (1474–1477); and in Act III, the advantageous treaties concluded with the Habsburg and Valois monarchs, which she hails as a “Tryumpff” (III, 6, 154). This is followed by a weakened present. Helvetia reproaches her cantons-sons for their lust for money, for the conversion of some of them to the Reformation, and even for their loss of faith, represented in Act IV by the figure of Atheismus.

The primary register of her many interventions is lament: “Helvetia klagt abermahlen den 13. Löbl. Cantonen ihren wunderlischen Zustand” (Helvetia once again complains to the thirteen honourable cantons about the strange situation in which they find themselves, stage direction IV, 9). Through her indignant and sorrowful maternity, the gender role assigned to her by Weissenbach, Helvetia conveys to the Swiss an attitude that is both accusatory and inclusive. This stance closely matches the communication strategy developed by the Catholic cantons towards their Protestant partners during the Counter‑Reformation : a strategy that sought both to denounce confessional divergences and to preserve the political alliance.

A New Republic’s Intersexual Icon ?

In the image designed by the Zurich artist Meyer for the frontispiece of the Contrafeth edition, Helvetia’s appearance at first seems more consistent with the title that names her Jungfrau, or virgin. Her supra-human nature is signalled by the halo surrounding her, dispersing the clouds “numini et lumini” (by divine will and in the light). Her gender identity, however, is far less clear. While her delicate face and cornucopia belong to a feminine visual code, her armour points to a masculine corporeality.

As Thomas Maissen has shown (Maissen, 2006), the process of Helvetia’s personification began after the legal recognition of Switzerland as an entity independent of the Holy Roman Empire with the ratification of the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. Only then could the Confederation conceive of itself as a unified oligarchic republic and assign its political sovereignty a feminine allegorical body, in accordance with the representational conventions discussed above. Meyer appears to have been the first artist to trouble this conventional femininity by equipping Helvetia with arms. She does not yet hold the spear and shield that will define her iconography in the eighteenth century; her armour, exclusively defensive, signifies the virgin’s resistance to any form of violation : sexual, military, or political. This meaning is reinforced by the fortified city and Alpine landscape unfurled at her feet. The choice may thus be read as an echo of the Swiss efforts, at the end of the Thirty Years’ War, to temper their reputation as ferocious warriors ; a first step in a longer process culminating in the official declaration of neutrality at the Congress of Vienna in 1815. If the illustrator’s aim was indeed to promote the image of a ‘new Switzerland’, sovereign, armed, yet peaceable, it does not align with the intentions of the dramatist. The discreet queerness of Meyer’s engraved Helvetia therefore enters into tension with the maternity staged in the theatre.

Another attribute strengthens this impression: the cornucopia carried by the figure. Associated with fertility, this object aligns poorly with Helvetia’s virginal status. Meyer seems in fact to have reworked an earlier model, the Topographia Helvetiae engraved by Merian in the 1630s (Schaller, 1995). Merian had depicted the circle of cantonal coats of arms surrounded by the celestial allegories of Pax and Victoria, and by a terrestrial pair made up of an Old Confederate armed with a halberd and a plump young woman holding a cornucopia. The former embodied the mercenary tradition and the martial past of the Swiss in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries; the latter represented the natural wealth of the territory, while perhaps also suggesting the current state of a homeland more prosperous, but less formidable and less virtuous than in earlier times. This offered female body, which Merian had anchored to the ground, was lifted by Meyer into the heavens in the form of an armoured virgin. Yet the transformation of the territory’s fertility into the inviolable body of the republic remains incomplete in the image, for Helvetia’s arms still bear an attribute ill‑suited to her new political significance.

Conclusion

The illustrated edition of the Contrafeth shows that, within a single object and within the same representational system, the political allegory, it was possible for fully contemporary artists to depict divergent conceptions of their country’s present political condition. As a devastated mother, Helvetia denounced, in Weissenbach’s drama, the failings of a Switzerland now torn apart by the Reformation and consumed by its appetite for wealth. As a fierce virgin, she celebrated, in Meyer’s engraving, the present of a Confederation that was sovereign and resistant to any form of submission. In doing so, each artist drew on pre‑existing allegorical traditions: that of the maternal Dame France, created during the Anglo‑French wars around 1400; and that of the virgin representing the Republic of the Seven United Provinces, the visual embodiment of the independence claimed by the Netherlands against Spain in the 1580s. The works cited below explore further the connections among these different “captures” of the political present in fictional female bodies.

Forthcoming

For an article on cross‑cultural French–German allegorical traditions, see DOUDET Estelle, “Dame France et Jungfrau Helvetia. Regards croisés sur le (trans)genre des allégories politiques, XV^e / XVII^e siècle,” Un Moyen Âge queer?, ed. Leticia Ding and Philippe Frieden, Neuchâtel, Alphil, forthcoming 2026.

For a comparative study of the Contrafeth text and illustrations, see DOUDET Estelle, “Wie (und warum) politische Allegorie auf der Bühne markiert werden sollte. Weissenbachs Eydgnoßsisches Contrafeth”, Kulturkontakte und Mobilitäten im deutschsprachigen Raum, ed. Julia Gold, Pia Selmayr, and Christoph Schanze, Berlin, De Gruyter, forthcoming 2027.

Select Bibliography

Sources

WEISSENBACH Johann Caspar, Eydgnoßsisches Contrafeth Auff- uund Abnemmender Jungfrawen Helvetiae, THOMPKE Hellmut (ed.), Zurich, Chronos Verlag, 2007 [1st ed. Zug, Jacob Ammon, 1673]. Online: https://www.digitale-sammlungen.de/de/view/bsb10122955?page=5

MERIAN Matthäus, Topographia Helvetiae, Frankfurt / Basel, 1642, p. 5. 1654 edition online:

https://www.e-rara.ch/zut/content/titleinfo/13597770

Studies

MAISSEN Thomas, Die Geburt der Republic: Staatsverständnis und Repräsentationen in den frühneuzeitlichen Eidgenossenschaft, 2006.

SCHALLER Marie-Louise, “Helvetia antiqua et nova. Antike Vorbilder für eine Integrationsfigur der Schweiz,” Helvetia Archaeologica 26, 1995, pp. 1–62.

YUVAL-DAVIS Nira, Gender and Nation, London, Sage, 1997.

01/06/202529/10/2025

Gem: “Old Contemporary Poets”: Constructing the Present of the Literary Past

Article by Estelle Doudet

Clad in a flowing cloak and robe, the man gazes into the distance with a look that is curious, perhaps even ironic. His clothing offers few clues as to the era in which he might have lived, but it suggests the social status of a cleric, a hypothesis reinforced by the round cap he wears. In contrast, the figure’s age is emphasized: the wrinkles on his face and the hands supported by a staff evoke old age. They also metaphorically suggest a belonging to the past. This engraved portrait, which opens chapter 91 of Book VI of Les Vrais Pourtraits et Vies des Hommes Illustres by André Thevet (1516–1592), depicts Jean de Meun, the French writer active in the second half of the thirteenth century.

By the time Thevet published his final major work in 1584, the author of the Roman de la Rose had long been regarded as a founding father of French letters. This explains his inclusion among the few vernacular writers in the pantheon of great men assembled by the historian. Yet, as Thevet himself notes, “it is not easy to determine precisely” the dates of birth and death of a writer who had lived two centuries earlier. Only the references that Meun may have made to his own time could help locate his period of activity. However, if such references exist in certain dedications by the “old poet, ” they are inconsistent: Le Livre de confort Boece is dedicated to Philip IV of France (r. 1286–1314), whereas Dodechedron—a divinatory treatise falsely attributed to Meun in the sixteenth century—is addressed to Charles V (r. 1364–1380). To navigate these chronological uncertainties, Thevet resorts to a well-known historical parallel: Meun, he claims, “was a contemporary of Dante, the Italian poet.”

André Thevet was not the first literary historian to take an interest in the contemporaneity of two authors then regarded as the founding figures of French and Italian letters. The Burgundian Jean Lemaire de Belges (1473–1524) had already noted it in La Concorde des deux langages (1511): “the good master Jehan de Meun was contemporary—that is, of the same time and faculty—as Dante.” Yet reconstructing the present of a prestigious past served different purposes at the beginning and the end of the sixteenth century. For Lemaire, evoking the mythical journey that supposedly brought Dante to Paris around 1300—where he met Meun and became both his admirer and “emulator”—aimed to justify the ties uniting French- and Italian-speaking poets “in our time,” around 1500. The temporal community formed by the author of the Roman de la Rose and the writer of the Divine Comedy, bound by both complicity and rivalry, was imagined as extending seamlessly into the intercultural exchanges of the Italian Wars. By contrast, in 1584, Thevet drew on Dante’s chronology to more precisely delimit Meun’s period of activity. Les Vrais Pourtraicts presented their parallel lives in terms of a shared time of living and dying—what Jean Bouchet, another of Thevet’s sources, had defined in 1545 as vivre et mourir ensemble. In emphasizing their “ancientness,” Thevet deliberately distanced both Jean de Meun and Dante from his own time. They no longer appear as the “ancient sources” of a tradition still alive in the works of the “moderns,” to borrow Lemaire’s terms, but as “old poets” with “rusted pens,” whom the historian alone can rescue from the remnants of a decaying memory—that is, as authors of the ‘Middle Ages’.

These two contrasting ways of conceptualising the present of a past age illustrate the transformative power of shifting perceptions, representations, and reconstructions of cultural epochs throughout the sixteenth century. In French-speaking regions, the decades from 1500 to 1530 saw numerous writers assert, for various reasons, a certain continuity between their own practices and those of their predecessors—primarily, those of the fifteenth century. By around 1550, discontinuity had emerged as a new criterion for evaluating poetic production. Certain avant-gardes embraced a rhetoric of rupture. One thinks, for instance, of the young radicals of the Pléiade and their manifesto, La Deffence et illustration by du Bellay (1549). Other intellectual circles placed greater value on a reflective return to a past now conceived as “origins”—a literary and cultural past open to archaeological inquiry or to reinvention as a form of national antiquity. Fauchet, with his Recueil de l’origine de la langue et poésie françoise (1581), Pasquier, with his Recherches de la France (also published in 1581), and Thevet, belong to such interpretive communities, which came to dominate the decades from 1570 to 1600.

Nevertheless, the combative tone with which André Thevet defended a Jean de Meun threatened by “the prison of oblivion” invites a more nuanced reading of this explanatory framework. From its earliest uses in French in the fifteenth century—particularly among writers of the Burgundian principality—the notion of contemporaneity carried a discriminating connotation: to share the same present did not necessarily mean to think alike or be valued equally.

Unlike Dante, Jean de Meun was not always regarded as a consensual founding figure. His “true portrait” thus became, for the polemicist Thevet, a weapon. On one hand, it served to target Thevet’s personal adversaries, such as the Anglican theologian John Bale (1495–1563), accused of having “Anglicised” the Roman de la Rose by overly praising Chaucer’s adaptations of Meun. On the other hand, it allowed him to attack those who refused to recognise in Jean de Meun the embodiment of the “French spirit” as Thevet imagined it: bawdy, witty, and Catholic. Among these “censors,” particular scorn is reserved for the “displeased” female readers. To ridicule them, Thevet inserted a facetious anecdote into the poet’s biography: Jean de Meun, he claims, was summoned by courtly ladies of his time to account for his scandalous romance. The boldest among them accused him of offending them with obscene verse and misogynistic fictions. Yet the witty poet reportedly escaped condemnation by inviting “the greatest whore” to punish him in public.

In reality—though Thevet does not acknowledge it—the accusation voiced by the “bold” lady reprises arguments first articulated by Christine de Pizan in her Debate on the Roman de la Rose (1401). It was, in fact, Christine de Pizan who first introduced the parallel between Jean de Meun and Dante. She argued in the Debate that the Divine Comedy was “a hundred times better composed” than the celebrated Roman de la Rose and more beneficial to its readers, leaving no justification, in her view, for lavishing praise upon Meun. Although Christine did not attempt to situate Dante and Jean chronologically, her argument had the effect of suggesting a simultaneity in their production while firmly denying any ethical or aesthetic equivalence between their works. Contemporary with Dante, Jean de Meun was nonetheless his inferior. For Christine, this meant his work no longer deserved to speak to the female readership of her own time.

By contrast, in the “life” crafted by Thevet, Dante appears merely as a historical counterpart to Meun. The anecdote mocking the “displeased” female readers further blurs temporal boundaries to achieve precisely what Thevet’s antiquarian method purported to resist: inviting readers at the end of the sixteenth century to see in the first “great French writer” a man of their own time.

To be published

Estelle Doudet, “Les communautés temporelles du XVI^e siècle face au ‘Moyen Âge’. Penser, représenter et évaluer un passé littéraire”. In La Culture médiévale à la Renaissance, edited by Adeline Desbois-Ientile, Nicolas Le Cadet et Sandra Provini. Geneva: Droz, to be published.

This research is part of WP1: Figuring Moments. Discursive and Visual Forms of the Present, within the subproject Modern Languages, Contemporary Poetics: French, Dutch, German, and English (14th–17th Centuries).

Bibliography

Primary Sources

Bouchet, Jean. Epistres morales et familieres du Traverseur. Paris: De Marnef, 1545. Book I, Epistle 14.

Christine de Pizan. Le Livre des epistres du debat sus le Rommant de la rose. Edited by Andrea Valentini. Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2016.

Lemaire de Belges, Jean. La Concorde des deux langages. Edited by Jean Frappier. Paris: Droz, 1947.

Thevet, André. Vrais Pourtraits et Vies des hommes illustres. Paris: Veuve Kervert and Gilles Chaudière, 1584. Vol. II, Book VI, chap. 91, “Jean Clopinel, dict de Meung,” 499r–502v.

Secondary Sources

Bruder, Anthony J. Recovering the Medieval in the French Renaissance: Claude Fauchet’s Veilles ou Observations. Geneva: Droz, 2024.

Lestringant, Frank. “Vrai portrait et vie de Jean Clopinel, dit de Meung.” In Sous la leçon des vents. Le Monde d’André Thevet, cosmographe de la Renaissance, 101–13. Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2020.

Lombart, Nicolas. “Les nom et renom de Jean de Meun à la Renaissance: des ‘arts poétiques’ aux ‘vies’ des auteurs illustres.” In La Fortune de Jean de Meun dans les lettres françaises, edited by Nicolas Lombart and Silvère Menegaldo, 176–204. Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2020.