The Lyon School (French: École de Lyon) is a term for a group of writers who lived in the 16th C.in the town of Lyon. They were chiefly poets, and were in some cases involved in the other arts; their particular interest as a group was a theory of spiritual love based on ideas of Plato and Plutarch and enunciated in Antoine Heroet’s Parfaicte Amye (1542).The group was noteworthy for the number of women who took an active
The leader of the Lyon School was Maurice Scève (c. IS00-64), architect, musician, and painter as well as a poet. He is known for the following main works: Délie (anagram of l’idée), objet de plus haule vertu (1544); Le Microcosm (1562), an encyclopedic poem on the fall of man; two eclogues – Arion (1536) and La Saulsaye (1547).
Other members of the group were Claude de Taillemont and women poet such as Jeanne Gaillarde, Pernette de Guillet, Clémence de Bourges, and Scève’s sisters Claudine and Sibylle.
However, the poet Louise Labé (c. 1525-66) was the most prominent of Scève’s colleagues. Some of her poetry was published in Lyon in 1555. She also wrote a prose allegory Le Débat de folie et d’amour.