Les Muses incognues, 1604. Édition critique par Guillaume Peureux et Hugh Roberts

Abstract

Over the last decades, scholars of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century poetry have shown a keen interest in the different forms, shapes, and moods of the French Muses: from Hubert Carrier’s Les Muses guerrières (Paris: Klincksieck, 1996) and Delphine Denis’s La Muse galante (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1997) to Pascal Debailly’s La Muse indignée (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2012) and La Muse du consistoire, presented by Julien Goeury (Geneva: Droz, 2016). To this non-exhaustive list should also be added Guillaume Peureux’s LaMuse satyrique, 1600–1622 (Geneva: Droz, 2014). With Hugh Roberts, Peureux has now produced a critical edition of one of the first collective volumes of satyrical poetry, Les Muses incognues ou la seille aux bourriers plaine de desirs et imaginations d’amour, published in 1604 by the Rouen printer and bookseller Jean Petit. Their edition, based on the only surviving copy, Paris, Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, MS 8-BL-12035, comes with an Introduction, notes on the establishment and transcription of the text, a glossary, a directory of expressions, a bibliography, an index nominum, and tables listing first lines and poem and section titles. The opening paragraph of the Introduction characterizes the editorial vogue of satyrical poetry, of which the Muses incognues is an early example, as the flourishing, between 1600 and 1622, of collective volumes of poems that are both satirical and inspired by a satyr’s posture. While this presentation suffices perhaps for an audience familiar with the genre, for non-specialist readers the lack of a more elaborate definition, which would explain the vulgar and obscene nature of satyrical poetry and its links with the satyrs from Greek mythology, risks hampering their understanding of the pages that follow. In these pages, the editors explore the semantic richness of the word ‘incognues’: unknown, unrevealed, ignoble. This last meaning resonates with the ‘seille aux bourriers’ [trash can] in the subtitle, which cleverly advertises both the devalued and the private nature of the poems. This analysis precedes a discussion of the context of the composition and publication of the recueil, in which the editors replace the long-accepted hypothesis that its principal author is Guy de Tours with one that considers this volume as the result of a complex process of compiling and copying poems for Jean Petit. They stress the fact that some parts of the volume suggest a collective rather than individual poetic activity. The last part of the Introduction briefly examines the relationship between the ‘poésie incognue’ picked up from the trash can and humanistic literary culture. Book historians might be dissatisfied with the information on Petit and his edition of the Muses incognues, but with the editors’ careful annotations, including lists of reprints and variants in no fewer than thirteen other recueils published between 1600 and 1622, as well as their elaborate glossary, readers from different backgrounds are provided with the necessary tools to study a text that would otherwise probably remain ‘incognu’. It has been argued that lingering in oblivion would, in fact, be a suitable destiny for this collection of poems filled with obscenities and misogynistic and homophobic verses. This new edition, however, allows us to apprehend the nature of these texts as well as their relation to humanistic literary culture, thus enriching and complexifying our understanding of early modern French poetry.