La Renaissance des mots: de Jean Lemaire de Belges à Agrippa d'Aubigné by Floyd Gray

Abstract

MLR, 104.4, 2009 1141 gender in various ways. In the firstchapter Swift borrows theDerridean concept of 'spectropolitics' in order to coin the term 'spectropoetics': a text is 'haunted' by anterior texts and discourses that, paradoxically, must be foregrounded and kept alive for the very purpose of refuting them and laying them to rest. Swift's analysis of the Champion des dames, including illustrations and marginal annotations in both manuscripts and early printings, brings out this intertextual dynamics, while also shedding light on its shifting reception by fifteenth-and sixteenth-century readers. The second chapter, on debate poems, examines the textual mise en scene of rhetorical performance, aswell as tracing the literaryappropriation of often very technical aspects of legal terminology and procedures. The third and final chapter focuses on the representation ofwomen and the construction of gender in a series of querelle texts.Exemplary women might be portrayed as overcoming their feminine weakness and achieving amasculine ideal; or theymight be seen as surpassing the norms of either sex through a trulyexceptional greatness. Still others achieve great ness through traits, such as courage and chivalric prowess, thatmight normally be thought of as masculine, but without sacrificing their femininity?for example, in accepting as 'natural' the category of'female warrior'. And finally, women might be seen as attaining exemplary excellence through traits identified as 'essentially' femi nine, such as patience andmodesty. Swiftalso provides a very interesting discussion of'cross-gender ventriloquism', noting that if male authors often choose to adopt a female voice, Christine de Pizan herself sometimes wrote inamale voice. Inher con clusion, finally,Swiftdeploys the insights shehas generated throughout thebook ina reading of thevery peculiar Rousier des dames (c. 1510). This book isa verywelcome contribution to the study of fifteenth-centuryFrench literature,a field thathas bene fitedfromgreater attention in recent years but is stillneglected inboth teaching and scholarship, and remains largely unknown even among medievalists. Swift's study shows thevery real interest that thismaterial holds for twenty-first-centuryreaders. Pembroke College, Cambridge Sylvia Huot La Renaissance des mots: de Jean Lemaire de Beiges a Agrippa d'Aubigne. By Floyd Gray. Paris: Champion. 2008. 433 pp. 76. ISBN 978-2-7453-1539-7. Parts 11-v of La Renaissance des mots rework various articles?or, in the case of Rabelais, introductory sections to critical editions?published by Floyd Gray since 1976; they offer interpretations of Rabelais, Du Bellay, the commentaries on Ron sard'sAmours byMuret and Belleau, Montaigne, La Bruyere as reader ofMontaigne, Jean Lemaire de Beiges, Jeanne Flore, and d'Aubigne. These essays are preceded, in Part 1,by reflections on topics such as the effectsof printing; the instability of French and its adoption of new functions; concepts of imitation, invention, and translation; notions of poetry; creative and polysemic uses of prose; and textual additions in Montaigne and Rabelais. Gray intends these varied discussions to show how Te fait litteraire, au xvie siecle, commence a prendre conscience de lui-meme comme specificite, c'est-a-dire comme technique et comme art' (pp. 14-15). Itbecomes clear thatGray does not 1142 Reviews thereby intend to indicate a concern primarily with sixteenth-century conceptual izations of particular sorts ofwriting as privileged: while some studies interrogate what Renaissance readers and writers appear to have thought theywere doing, they do not focus exclusively on this. For example, Gray discusses the sense in which Muret and Belleau promoted Ronsard's poetry as a privileged discourse but thenmoves on to regretwhat Muret and Belleau?along with most modern critics, according toGray?do not do. The point towhich Gray repeatedly returns is that the texts studied use words in complex ways, and therefore correspond to the 'literary' as Gray defines it.The titleRenaissance des mots reflectsGrays assertion thatwords?or, rather, creative exploitations of them?were 'reborn' in the Renaissance (p. 142). The common thread in all of Gray's studies is the examination of themyriad different and rich ways inwhich Renaissance texts employed words; this is often accompanied by criticism of interpretative practices (mostly modern but also sixteenth-century) which do not focus upon the literary, that is,which interest themselves inwhat is said rather than in how it is said. As Gray puts it,his readings...