Timothy Chesters weighs in on the authorship controversy over France’s most famous female Renaissance poet, Louise Labé (c.1520-1564).Twenty years ago a prominent French critic, Mireille Huchon, caused uproar by alleging that Olivier de Magny, a male poet traditionally believed to have been Labé’s lover, forged her poems as a joke. Since then Huchon and her opponents have traded documentary evidence but paid scant attention to questions of style. Tim's article attempts a careful metrical analysis of Magny’s verse and the poems attributed to Labé and in so doing casts some doubt on the forgery hypothesis. 

Article DOI: https://doi.org/10.3828/fs.2025.79.3.1