Lettres de femmes: textes inédits et oubliés du XVIe au XVIIIe siècle ed. by Elizabeth C. Goldsmith, Colette H. Winn

Abstract

846 Reviews Lettres defemmes: textes inedits et oublies duXVIe auXVIIIe sie'cle. Ed. by ELIZABETH C. GOLDSMITH and COLETTEH. WINN. (Textes de la Renaissance, 89) Paris: Champion. 2005. xlii+448pp. E83. ISBN 2-7453-II23-9. Common sense dictates that when Marguerite de Navarre mentions her daughter (p. I7), she is not pregnant with her. The footnote iswrong. Is she pregnant with her son (is the date of the letter wrong?)? Is she even pregnant? Mlle de Nantes was not Montespan's second child by Louis XIV (p. 294) but her third, following Maine and Vexin. Such errors ('i 670, au debut du regne de Louis XIV', p. xxxix), too numerous for comfort, betoken carelessness, and shake the reader's confidence. What can be believed, and what must one verify? Elsewhere, insufficient diligence is employed. How can the assistant editor who declares thatMlle deMursay 'n'apu etre identifie[e]' (p. 293) fail to recognize Mme deMaintenon's so-called niece, laterMme de Caylus? Another editor avers that Suzanne Necker's correspondent Schomberg 'n'apparait dans aucun dictionnaire biographique' (p. 345), a poor excuse for not tracking down Voltaire's friend Gottlob Louis, comte de Schomberg. All this vitiates the genuinely authoritative erudition on display elsewhere, even before account is taken of such questionable strategies as the use of privileges to establish primacy of publication, especially in defiance of explicit contradictory evidence (p. xvi). A privilege is not an acheve d'imprimer. The Nassau sisters discuss family business, Necker supplements literary and intellectual themes with a dash of travel writing, Jeanne des Anges (she of the scandal of Urbain Grandier) unsurprisingly contributes devotional material, and an anonymous account of Eleonore de Roye, princesse de Conde, praises the manner of her death. It goes unnoticed by the editors that a disproportionately large number of these fascinating writers were politically or religiously suspect, but what ismost conspicuous is the heartwarming friendship that characterizes every letter, including those by the other women here represented: Louise de Bourges, Louise de Coligny, Mme du Houx, Mme de Scudery (three of her letters restored thanks to good detective work), and Mme de Meinieres. The confidently stated editing principles are not always applied but fall prey to the idiosyncrasies of the individual assistant editors -ven the subtitling and indentations are inconsistent and the footnote about the positioning of source references on page I3 is falsified by the practice adopted. The enterprise deserved firmer general editorial control but the letters themselves are riveting and the anthology will be an essential primer until overtaken by the fuller individual studies of these women's eloquent correspondence that Elizabeth C. Goldsmith and Colette H. Winn presumably intended to provoke. UNIVERSITYOFBATH WILLIAM BROOKS L'iEuvre libertine de Bonaventure de Fourcroy. Ed. by MIGUEL BENITEZ. (Libre pensee et litterature clandestine, 27) Paris: Champion. 2005. 673 pp. E85. ISBN 2-7453-I262-6. Miguel Benitez here provides scholars of libertine and clandestine authors with an extremely detailed presentation of the works of Bonaventure de Fourcroy, who was born around i662 and imprisoned between I698 and I704 because of his writings. A general introduction into the life and work of the author is followed by five carefully edited texts, each of which is introduced and analysed in turn: Doutes Sur laRelligion Proposes aMss les docteurs de Sorbone (Fourcroy's major work), La Vie d'Apollonius natif de Thiane, Les trois stiles dans toute sorte d'ouvrages d'eloquence et de poesie, La Bride du Pape, and the encoded writings brought together as Sur laMagie: les documents chiffres. Benitez has based his edition on Fourcroy's manuscripts, which are on occasion in ...