Catherine des Roches’s authorial participation in the famous poetic flea contest during the Grands Jours of Poitiers in 1579 was all but forgotten a decade and a half after her death when Estienne Pasquier claimed the volume of La Puce de Madame Des-Roches as his own by eliminating her name from the title in his collective work La jeunesse d’Estienne Pasquier (1610). As if sensing such a fate and wishing above all to remind her readers of her literary contribution to the contest, Catherine des Roches published her flea poems as responces in her Secondes oeuvres (1583). This study proposes several possible reasons for her inclusion of these replies in her second volume of collected works.

Researchers should cite this work as follows:

• Larsen, A. R., (2025), "On Reading La Puce de Madame Des-Roches: Catherine des Roches's Responces (1583)", HSSCommons: (DOI: )

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1. Renaissance and Reformation

Original publication: Larsen, Anne R. "On Reading La Puce de Madame Des-Roches: Catherine des Roches's Responces (1583)." Renaissance and Reformation 34 (2): 2010. 63-75. DOI: 10.33137/rr.v34i2.10835. This material has been re-published in an unmodified form on the Canadian HSS Commons with the permission of Iter Canada / Renaissance and Reformation. Copyright © the author(s). Their work is distributed by Renaissance and Reformation under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. For details, see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/.