Mère, courtisane et martyre. Corps féminin et cruauté dans Les Tragiques de Théodore Agrippa d’Aubigné

Agrippa d’Aubigné’s complex poem Les Tragiques (1616) relates through the perspective of a Huguenot narrator the distress in war-torn France during the time of religious conflicts in the 16th century. In this violent context, the female body plays a crucial role, both as victim and perpetrator of cruelty. It occupies in its concrete corporeality the poem’s imagery on different semantic levels. First in its role as a maternal body, experiencing a gradual and irreversible process of loss and negation of its functions and qualities related to motherhood. Second, as a caricatural representation of a courtesan, it embodies cruelty as one of the worst vices resulting from the corruption of morals. Finally, it is at the core of brutal depictions of martyrdom, expressing metonymically the struggles of the Huguenots. All these configurations relate to whether inflicted or suffered cruelty, but also to a significant political figure, seen as the origin of all ills: Catherine de’ Medici.