Hills of Contemplation and Signifying Circles: Spenser and Guy Le Fèvre de la Boderie

Abstract

SOME DECADES AGO, in a study that over the years has provoked both admiration and objection, Robert Ellrodt argued that Spenser probably read Ficino's Sopra VAmove in the 1588 edition of a translation by the French Neoplatonic poet Guy Le Fevre de la Boderie, first published in 1578 as Discours de I'honneste amour sur le Banquet de Platon. ' For Ellrodt, one of the benefits to be had from sorting out which Renaissance Platonists (I would add semi-Platonists or quasi-Platonists) lie behind Spenser's poetry is the help that such work might provide in determining the degree to which Spenser felt a tension between Christianity and Platonism and to what extent they merged in his mind, logically or not. Certainly Le Fevre, one of the most syncretic poets of the Renaissance, if one of the most obsessed and self-repetitive, felt no such tension. In the 1578 edition of Discours, for example, his dedicatory letter to de (sister of Henri III) reports that Ficino thought Plato had prophesied the coming of Christ, bringer of Sapience and Love.2 After all, MARIE is an anagram of AIMER, and there are clear parallels between Plato's love and the kisses in Solomon's Song of Songs-no wonder that Marguerite de Valois is an anagram of Gise le Verite d'Amour (lies [dwells?] the truth of Love). The flattery is overdone, Spenser might have thought, but flattering queens is what poets do, even if part of this French poet's name, anagrammatized at the end of the epistle, is L'Un Guide Orfee. Orpheus did not flatter queens, after all, although that omission might seem a mistake if we remember his death at the hands of angry women.In this essay I will suggest that there were political as well as literary reasons for English poets to have known Le Fevre, at least by name, and that his poetry, particularly his long cosmological poem La Galliade (1578), is worth remembering, even worth reading, by those who study Spenser. After describing the poem I will take as an example of Spenserian moments that gain further resonance when set next to this French poem the scene (Lx) in which St. George is guided by the hermit Contemplation up a hill, one that the narrator compares to Sinai, Olivet, and Parnassus and from which, with a further ascent, the knight can see the New Jerusalem.3 James E. Phillips cites this passage from The Faerie Queene at the start of his helpful essay on Spenser's religious syncretism.4 To give this hill and a not dissimilar one in La Galliade a fuller context, I will also offer a small mountain range of ones that Spenser and his contemporaries might have known.Le Fevre was himself as syncretic a poet as Spenser was likely to find, a devout and meticulously orthodox Catholic with a liking for divine circles, ecstatic ascents, anagrams, and number symbolism whose mind for all its theological orthodoxy hovered somewhere between Platonism and Renaissance occultism. His range of languages was impressive. In Paris he published translations ofjeronimo Munoz on the supernova of 1572 (1574), of Francesco Giorgio on L'Hatmonie du monde (1579), of Ficino's Trois livres de la vie (Three Books on Life, 1582), and, in Antwerp, of a tract on baptism by Severus, patriarch of Alexandria (in fact of Antioch). Near Eastern languages fascinated him, as did Italian Neoplatonism and the cosmic circles that were for him even more alive with the sound of music than they were for his French contemporaries.My focus here is on La Galliade, but Le Fevre wrote other books worth remembering. L'Encyclie des Secrets de l'Eternite (1571) merges biblical poetry and divine kisses with macro- and micro-cosmography, celebrations ofDavid with Orphic odes. The picture of Le Fevre that prefaces it, giving his age as thirty, is encircled by Greek words praying-in an anagram of his full name-May Holy David bud forth as One Orphically, while below the image a Hebrew poem claims that, like a merged soul, spirit, and body, this poet merges three in one: Virgil, Orpheus, the upstanding Greek (with a pun on Or-Pe in Hebrew, light of the mouth), and David, the leader and singer (Fig. …