Jean Lemaire de Belges

Who was Jean Lemaire de Belges?

Jean Lemaire de Belges was a Walloon poet and historian who lived primarily in France.

He was born in Hainaut, the godson and possibly a nephew of Jean Molinet, and spent some time with him at Valenciennes, where the elder writer held a kind of academy of poetry. Lemaire in his first poems calls himself a disciple of Molinet. In certain aspects he does belong to the school of the grands rhétoriqueurs, but his great merit as a poet is that he emancipated himself from the affectations of his masters. This independence of the Flemish school he owed in part perhaps to his studies at the University of Paris and to the study of the Italian poets at Lyon, a centre of the French Renaissance. In 1504 he was attached to the court of Margaret of Austria, duchess of Savoy, afterwards Regent of the Netherlands. For this princess he undertook more than one mission to Rome where he came into contact with the culture of the Italian Renaissance; he became her librarian and a canon of Valenciennes.

To her were addressed his most original poems, the burlesque Épîtres de l'amant vert, of 1505. The amant vert of the title being a green parrot belonging to his patroness. This latter piece was subsequently utilised in the sublimely melancholic Soubz ce tumbel by Pierre de la Rue. It is an intense elegiac farewell to Margaret's 'green lover'.