L'Allégorie de l'Antiquité à la Renaissance

Abstract

Études réunies par Brigitte Pérez-Jean et Patricia Eichel-Lojkine. Paris, Champion, 2004. 684 pp. Hb €58.00. This substantial volume brings together some thirty-two contributions from specialists in a range of disciplines and periods whose common focus is on allegory and its uses. The organization is broadly chronological, with each of the two sections grouping together articles around themes relevant to the historical period. The first section deals with the origins of allegory from antiquity to the early Christian era, focusing on texts in Latin and Greek from antiquity, the Byzantine period and beyond; the second with the vernacular and Latin texts of the Middle Ages and early modern period. The shift in focus from the first to the second section is inevitably away from allegoresis towards the creation of literary texts, the production of allegory in narrative and the visual arts: it was in the Middle Ages that allegory started to be something other than a method of interpretation, a way of reading Homeric myths. The first section is further subdivided into parts dealing with theoretical and philosophical background and literary practice. The second has thematic groupings centred on Christian uses of pagan myth, rhetoric and allegorical creation, and architecture and the visual arts. Both sections deal extensively with the two principal types of allegory, the allegorical narrative and the personification of abstractions. Sauzeau brings out some complications in this latter category in his article on the function of personifications in Greco-Roman religion. Allegoresis is by no means neglected in the second section, which includes several articles on Christian readings of Scripture and myth: the notion of ‘saving’ myths by putting them into a Christian interpretative framework is nuanced in the articles by Meyers on Theodolus and Ballestra-Puech on Dante's Arachne. The coherence of the volume's organization does not preclude variety. Some of the contributions chart the history and prehistory of the term ‘allegory’ (Brisson, Chiron and Thomas in the first section). Others survey the differing approaches to allegory from a philosophical or epistemological perspective: included are articles on Aristotle, Stoicism, Epicureanism, Scepticism and Neoplatonism; Fauquier's article on Proclus' reading of the Parmenides is outstanding. Still others chart the recurrence of a certain theme in different texts: the ‘allegorical temple’, for instance, or the prosopopoeia of the Roman patria (Martin), an article that has its counterpart in the second section in Moreau's piece on Ronsard and d'Aubigné. Other contributions develop interesting and sometimes surprising readings of specific texts: Dante is well represented, but not at the expense of lesser-studied authors of the early Christian world (Arator, Martianus Capella) and the Renaissance (René d'Anjou, Béroalde de Verville). Both sections are supplemented by extensive bibliographies. The chronological approach coincides satisfyingly with the development of central themes. The final section of the second part focuses on the visual arts and architecture, figuring the shift in favour of allegory's poetic function, as the image breaks free from the constraints of rhetoric. Spica's article on emblem books and the interweaving of narrative and image stands as an appropriate conclusion to the volume.