Jean was born in
Hainaut (Hainault), 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. In his first poems, Lemaire calls himself a disciple of Molinet. In certain aspects he does belong to the school of the
grands rhétoriqueurs ("rhetoricians"), but his great merit as a poet is that he emancipated himself from the affectations of his masters. He perhaps owed this independence from the
Flemish school in part 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, and afterwards
Regent of the
Netherlands. For Margaret 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. Jean's most original poems were addressed to Margaret: the burlesque , of 1505 (see
1505 in poetry). The (green lover) of the title is a green parrot belonging to his patroness. This latter piece was subsequently utilised in the sublimely melancholic
(Within this tomb) by
Pierre de la Rue. It is an intense elegiac farewell to Margaret's 'green lover'. Lemaire gradually became more French in his sympathies, eventually entering the service of
Anne of Brittany, wife of
Louis XII, and supporting Louis's ambitions to create a church relatively independent of the
Pope. His prose (1510–1514), largely adapted from
Benoît de Sainte-Maure, is a novel-like history that connects the
House of Burgundy with
Hector. Lemaire probably died before 1525.
Étienne Pasquier,
Pierre de Ronsard and
Joachim du Bellay all acknowledged their indebtedness to him. In his love for antiquity, his sense of rhythm, and even the peculiarities of his vocabulary he anticipated the humanist movement led by Du Bellay and Ronsard, the . ==Works==