Culture and Conflict in Seventeenth-Century France and Ireland

Abstract

Edited by Sarah Alyn Stacey and Véronique Desnain. Dublin, Four Courts Press, 2004. 288 pp. Hb €55.00. This wide-ranging collection of essays has its origin in a conference organized to celebrate the acquisition of the Geoffrey Aspin collection of seventeenth-century French books by the library of Trinity College, Dublin. The first section, ‘Women, Men and Texts in Conflict’, opens disappointingly: Véronique Desnain, in a survey of Racine's biblical tragedies, deals only cursorily with the nature and extent of his adaptation of Old Testament narratives, in order to reach a simplistically misogynistic interpretation; and Kate Currey takes an overly reductive art-equals-life approach to the one surviving play of Madame de Saint-Balmont. In two erudite scientific pieces, Rebecca Wilkin considers seventeenth-century treatises on generation in the light of the metaphor of authorship as paternity; and Jean-Paul Pittion offers an engaging account of medicine and religion in La Rochelle in the period leading up to 1685, in which he charts the evolution of differing medical practices within increasingly rival confessional groups. Returning to literary matters, Craig Moyes considers the crisis of patronage with reference to Furetière's Roman bourgeois, and gives convincing evidence of the evolution of mécénat d'état in the aftermath of the Fouquet affair; and Sarah Alyn Stacey eloquently evokes cosmic harmony and disharmony in the poetry of Saint-Amant, showing how at the last humankind is subordinate to the dichotomous forces of nature. The second section addresses moral conflicts. Michael Moriarty conducts a scholarly examination of the problem of freedom in Arnauld's defence of Jansenius, and subtly analyses the gamut of theological positions at issue; and Mark Bannister explores related questions in Jean-Pierre Camus's Histoires tragiques, ranging as they do from the gratuitously blood-curdling to the (apparently) providentially ordered. David Culpin succinctly disentangles the relationship between honnêteté and raillerie with reference to La Bruyère; and Pascale Feuillée-Kendal charts, somewhat technically, the evolution of legal procedures in the second half of the century.