Marvelous Effects and Hidden Means: Justice and Magic in Early Modern France

202 Reviews Parergon 21.2 (2004) alimentary or any other fashion, appears dangerous in this collection of poems where ‘experience as possession … seems under assault’ (p. 206), particularly in the earlier version of ‘The Holy Communion’in the W. Manuscript. Rather than a decorous Anglican ‘middle way’, Netzley discerns a struggle between sensuality and pragmatism being played out in the poems. All primary texts are translated, the Index is comprehensive and the few typographical errors are minor ones. Mary Scrafton Adelaide, South Australia Kettering, Sharon, Patronage in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century France (Variorum Collected Studies Series CS738), Aldershot, Ashgate, 2002; cloth; pp. xvi, 286; £55; ISBN 0860788814. This Variorum edition brings together eleven of Sharon Kettering’s articles on patronage. Originally published between 1989 and 1993, these essays follow upon Kettering’s seminal Patrons, Brokers and Clients in Seventeenth-Century France of 1986. Covering patronage from its apogee in the sixteenth and early to mid- seventeenth centuries through its decline during the reign of Louis XIV, the collection forms an exceptionally coherent whole with minimal repetition (one exception is that Kettering twice challenges Kristen Neuschel’s thesis that clientage is anachronistic applied to sixteenth-century warrior culture, put forward in her Word of Honor: Interpreting Noble Culture in Sixteenth-Century France, in I and again in IV). The first set of four essays provides an overview of the topic, laying out and considering the categories modern historians use for understanding patronage. In ‘Patronage in Early Modern France,’ Kettering critiques some of the prominent recent positions on the language of patronage, re-affirming that the patron/client relationship was a material one motivated by self-interest and justifying her historical method of taking into account both the social scientific approach, which is necessary to ‘distinguishing long-term trends and causal explanations often imperceptible to contemporaries’ (I, p. 856) and the cultural historical approach, which seeks to determine how contemporaries experienced their situations.The distinction between the system as it actually existed and the system as it was perceived by those who lived within it is an important one, and it should be maintained, Kettering argues in relation to historical models that understand patronage as a primarily linguistic phenomenon. In her second essay, ‘Gift-Giving in early modern France’, she Reviews 203 Parergon 21.2 (2004) proposes a model of patronage based upon the obligatory reciprocity of gift-giving as analyzed by Mauss. She puts the overlapping categories of kin and friendship into the context of patronage in ‘Patronage and Kinship in Early Modern France’ and ‘Friendship and Clientage in Early Modern France’, examining in particular the wide semantic field of the word ami. The second set of two essays investigates female patronage. ‘The Patronage Power of Early Modern French Noblewomen’suggests that because ‘members of all-male political clienteles were often initially connected by kinship or marriage ties to women,’women ‘affected the formation and dissolution of political alliances’ (V, p. 819). They exercised considerable power as brokers throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The careers of several women in noble households are traced in ‘The Household Service of Early Modern French Noblewomen’. The role of brokers is the subject of the third set of two essays, ‘The Historical Development of Political Clientelism’and ‘Brokerage at the Court of Louis XIV’. Here Kettering proposes a ‘broker model of political integration’ (VII, p. 432) in states undergoing centralization.As the central government develops and expands, local brokers, individuals in a position to negotiate patron/client relationships between third parties, are crucial in mediating governmental integration into the different regions.The stronger the central government, the less necessary brokerage becomes; the chain from the royal court to the provinces becomes increasingly less significant during the reign of Louis XIV. Royal patronage became ever more important to noble fortunes, which had the effect of attenuating nobles’ties to their former clients and strengthening noble dependence upon the king. The final set of three essays, ‘Clientage During the French Wars of Religion’, ‘Patronage and Politics During the Fronde’ and ‘The Decline of Great Noble Clientage During the Reign of Louis XIV’ map the decline of noble patronage from the Wars of Religion...

Reviewed by: Menstruation and Procreation in Early Modern France by Cathy McClive Claire Cage Cathy McClive. Menstruation and Procreation in Early Modern France. Women and Gender in the Early Modern World. Farnham, Surrey, UK: Ashgate, 2015. xi + 267 pp. $124.95 (978-0-7546-6603-5). The Encyclopédie of Diderot and d’Alembert declared, “Women’s menses are one of the most curious and difficult phenomena of the human body.”1 Cathy McClive’s excellent study explores the complex meanings of this “most curious” phenomenon in early modern France. Her book challenges existing scholarship that emphasizes the negative associations with menstruation and misogynistic elements of the early modern discourse on menstruation—“the myth of menstrual misogyny.” McClive does so by masterfully bringing to light diverse interpretations of menstruation and its role in reproduction and health in early modern France. Her work focuses on elite perceptions of menstruation through the careful examination of theological, medical, legal, and personal sources. It first turns its attention to early modern French translations of the Bible, specifically the passages in Leviticus prohibiting sex during menstruation. In this complex and nuanced chapter, McClive argues that neither Catholic nor Protestant translations of Leviticus promoted the view of menstruating women as physically unclean but instead expressed concerns about the ritual or spiritual impurity of not only menses but also semen. In her analysis of medical theorists’ responses to religious prohibitions on sex during menstruation, McClive stresses the uncertain connection between procreation and menstruation. While some early modern medical texts such as Aristotle’s Masterpiece, the popular sex manual first published in seventeenth-century London, identified sex during menstruation as a cause of monstrous births, McClive argues that learned French texts did not link menstruation to monstrosity but did consider the possibility of adverse health consequences for a fetus conceived during a woman’s menses. French medical authorities questioned when was the optimal timing of sex during the menstrual cycle for healthy conception and what was an appropriate quantity of menses, which was understood to provide nourishment for the fetus during pregnancy. [End Page 329] Physicians and jurists shared a preoccupation with issues of menstrual regularity and irregularity that shaped various civil and criminal cases. One of the most remarkable cases was the famous trial involving Catherine Cadière, who accused her Jesuit confessor Jean-Baptiste Girard of seduction, “spiritual incest,” bewitchment, and abortion. Cadière in turn was accused of faking the stigmata with her menses. McClive offers a new perspective on the cause célèbre by analyzing how Cadière’s menstrual calendars were used in legal contests over the questions of whether she had indeed been pregnant and whether she could have used her menses to fake the stigmata. McClive scrutinizes other medicolegal affairs involving declarations of pregnancy required of unmarried or widowed women to avoid possible charges of infanticide, medical reports in assault cases where women claimed to have a pregnancy endangered by the attack, and cases of contested legitimacy, particularly for a six-month or eleventh-month pregnancy. Her analysis reveals that the cessation of menstruation was not considered certain proof of pregnancy. Some women could menstruate or bleed heavily through pregnancy, while others could be pregnant without ever having menstruated. The signs of pregnancy, the duration of an individual pregnancy, and the possible minimum and maximum lengths of gestation were all uncertain and contested. In her final chapter, on accounts of menstruating men and bleeding hermaphrodites, McClive suggests that male periodic bleeding, such as nosebleeds and bleeding hemorrhoids, was connected to “vicarious menstruation,” or regular periodic bleeding from a nonvaginal orifice, in early modern French humoral medicine. McClive challenges the widely held view that menstruation became seen as an exclusively female phenomenon by the late eighteenth century. Although McClive traces certain shifts in medical understandings of menstruation over the course of the early modern period, her account is one of continuity. Presumably more significant changes, including a more essentialist association between menstruation and the female body, emerged during the nineteenth century, and the link between ovulation and menstruation was established. Without further studies, it is unclear whether understandings of menstruation varied and shifted at different points across Europe and across the...

<b>This is an Active Citation data project. Active Citation is a precursor approach to<br/><a href="https://qdr.syr.edu/ati">Annotation for Transparent Inquiry (ATI)</a>. It has now been converted to the ATI format. The assembled project can be viewed at:</b> <h3><a href="https://qdr.syr.edu/atipaper/democratic-and-judicial-stagnation#annotations:group:2Nopp9mx" >https://qdr.syr.edu/atipaper/democratic-and-judicial-stagnation</a> <h3/> <h3>Broader research project overview</h3> <p>Contemporary expressions of judicial empowerment, this book argues, are the product of multiple causes linked together in a historical sequence. The puzzle I grapple with in this book is the presence of intermittently high levels of judicial empowerment in Uganda and Malawi and weak levels of judicial empowerment in Tanzania. All three cases exhibit high levels of neopatrimonial rule and elite insecurities and high levels of interference. I argue that evidence of higher levels of judicial empowerment in Uganda and Malawi, compared to Tanzania, is best explained through reference to the critical junctures. These critical junctures have helped shape the internal dynamics of the institutions, which in turn strengthen or weaken the ability of the courts to resist interference and maintain decision-making autonomy. Courts have evolved as the result of particular historical struggles and pathways. The footprints of colonialism, authoritarian dictators, and elite-led transitions are reflected in contemporary institutions.</p> <p>The book finds that high levels of interference do not necessarily correlate with judicial weakness. Despite intense attacks on judicial independence, the courts have sustained some autonomy in Malawi and Uganda. Judicial decision making acts as a feedback loop, and depending on the degree of institutional strength (i.e., levels of support, solid leadership, strong institutional protections), courts will then shape future strategies against interference.</p> <p>The book identifies seven ways in which judges construct their own power: <ul> <li>Through decisionmaking, signaling to both the government and opposition</li> <li>Through the formation of strategic off-bench alliances</li> <li>Through the emergence of a courageous judicial culture</li> <li>Judicial leadership is critical</li> <li>Speed at which judges handle and dispose of cases</li> <li>Judges frame their decisions beyond the mere legality of the question</li> <li>Deep pool of potential judicial personnel</li> </ul> In sum, examining the pathways to judicial empowerment allows us to reveal critical moments of change, but also to identify the iterative effects of regime and institution interaction. In other words, judicial empowerment is not simply a reflection of the route or path taken, but of the cumulative effects of institutional layering over time.</p> <h3>Methods</h3> <p>The primary method of measuring the dependent variable – judicial empowerment - is an examination of politically salient cases. Politically salient cases were identified through interviews, newspaper coverage, and selected secondary literature.</p> <p>I collected reported cases in the United States (Harvard University) and the United Kingdom (School of Oriental and African Studies and the British Library). In addition, the Africalaw database incorporates Tanzania and Uganda from 1999 to the present. More recently, the Africalii project has collected cases in all three countries. In the field I found that the only official record is the handwritten court registry. In Malawi, I collected data from the court register. Tanzania has national law reports through 1997. However, as my research on Tanzania progressed, it became evident that the editorial board was alleged by several informants to have been highly politicized. Finally, Uganda has not published a law report since 1957. But old case files were inaccessible due to limited physical access. In Uganda, case files are stored in the basement of the High Court in Kampala. The room is now so full, it is impossible to open the door to the storage facility. Despite these challenges, I was able to obtain a close to complete universe of what I term “politically significant cases.” Analyzing the universe of significant political cases, and conducting a close textual analysis of the actual decisions, have led to important insights that might not be gained through simply counting pro- or anti-government decisions.</p> <p>The majority of fieldwork was conducted from August 2006 to July 2007. Second trips to Malawi and Tanzania took place during the summer of 2009. While conducting field research, I also collected archival research at newspaper offices, as this was important for piecing together timelines and identifying important cases. Finally, the last major resource for my analysis was interviews. I conducted interviews with legal scholars and lawyers, international donors, civil society activists, and most importantly with judges in all three countries. I interviewed several high court judges and at least one constitutional/supreme court judge in every country. The interviews were semi-structured to allow for comparison among the respondents, but not so rigidly as to shut off the possibility of gleaning information I had not previously considered. The ultimate goal was not to interview every past and present high court justice, but to garner enough information to discern both behavioral and attitudinal patterns.</p> <p>Through the use of snowball techniques, I interviewed more than sixty informants in the field. One of the problems with relying on referrals was that people often connected me to individuals they believed would tell me what I wanted to hear. This often included the more outspoken and assertive judges, for example. So in addition I approached many individuals not through referral, but based on prior desk research. The interviews were conducted anonymously, and ranged in length from 30 to 160 minutes. Interviewees are identified throughout by occupation and nationality only. Specific titles such as “Chief Justice” have been eliminated.</p> <h3>Data capture modes</h3> <p>Interviews were recorded and transcribed. Notes were taken during all interviews and sometimes observations recorded after the interviews. All interview data are kept anonymous. Subjects are prominent political and legal elites. They are identified by profession and location only. Court cases were scanned and photocopied. Newspaper articles were summarized and logged in data sheet in Excel.</p> <h3>Logic of activation and annotation</h3> <p>I activate citations that are central to my argument, or are controversial and contestable within the literature.</p> <p>I annotate the majority of citations drawn from original field data. I explain the data collection techniques and methodological limitations, particularly as it relates to news sources. I also annotate citations which speak directly to major theoretical claims and controversies in the literature. I also attempt to link the annotations to either full text or large portions of the interview, news source, court judgment, secondary literature.</p> <p>In regards to attaching portions of the interview transcripts, I have redacted large portions of the interview to preserve anonymity. I provide a page or two before the quote and after the quote to elucidate the full context of the quote and allow the reader to further assess its validity and usefulness in supporting my arguments.</p> <p>In some cases additional data has been collected since the publication of the book. This is referenced and, where possible, is provided.</p> <p>References to court judgments are linked to full PDF’s of the judgments. Some of these PDF’s are the author’s own copies, others are now available online. Where possible, both the PDF and the URL are provided. This is also the case with news articles. Where web links are not available, extended quotes or portions of the original article are included. </p>

This article unpacks the contexts and meanings of one extended episode surrounding a notary's wife, her husband, their kin, his clients, and the judicial system. It suggests how women as agents and subjects were central in the interlocking web of social relations and laws that maintained a complex, negotiated, and contested, household-based gender hierarchy as a key element of the social and political topography of early modern Trance. The legal disadvantages and exclusions women faced were key elements in the maintenance of an inequitable gender hierarchy. Yet "the law" was a complicated matter involving national decrees promulgated by the monarchy and regional customary laws. Moreover, these laws gained meaning only in the encounters between the many different actors—spouses and kin who were part of middling families, as well as notaries, judges, and lawyers whose roles were to put laws into practice—that constituted the legal process.

In early modern France, feuds did not come to an end when either of the disputing parties had recourse to law. The judicial system was not neutral, nor was the law free from the social and political constraints in which it operated. For the elite, litigation was a way of life that consumed money and imposed immense psychological burdens. For those at the lower end of the elite, desperate to keep up appearances, the lawsuit was probably more all-consuming and had greater import than for their peers who had factotums to take the strain and who enjoyed a greater variety of recreational activities. To feuding parties, writs, summonses, and other court orders were provocations attended by violence. This chapter outlines the role of justice in dealing with heinous crimes in early modern France, including the legal procedure, the trial, chicanery, legal costs, and punishment.

Reviewed by: The Written World: Space, Literature, and the Chorological Imagination in Early Modern France by Jeffrey N. Peters Roland Racevskis Peters, Jeffrey N. The Written World: Space, Literature, and the Chorological Imagination in Early Modern France. Northwestern UP, 2018. ISBN 978-0-8101-3697-7. Pp. xii + 260. In Plato's Timaeus, the concept of the chora shades toward spatiality while remaining irreducible to straightforward definition as space or thing. In an introductory chapter, Peters explores Derrida's reading of this platonic dialogue to evoke chora as "an ineffable principle of cosmology that gives shape not only to the universe itself but also to the stories that tell of the world and its becoming" (19). As this book argues, those stories changed significantly in seventeenth-century France, as did the relationship between humanity and the physical world, whether perceived or imagined. Early modern notions of place and space were in flux, and literary authors sketched the conceptual contours of new thinking about the ontology of becoming. Starting with an analysis of Boileau's Art poétique as a kind of geography, Peters traces the significance of what he calls "the chorological imagination" (20) through works by La Fontaine, Molière, Corneille, Racine, d'Urfé, Scudéry, and Lafayette. A discussion of Molière's L'école des femmes in the light of Lucretian materialism interestingly underlines the particularizing force of a comedy that privileges the local over the universal. Lucretius's atomism points to gaps, infinitesimal spaces between particles. Like chora, gap space is both ineffable and originary, as in the stitching, connecting activity of La Fontaine's bees in"Les frelons et les mouches à miel."Corneille's L'illusion comique, an often underestimated play, contains key insights into poetic and theatrical invention as an irreducible spatial dynamics of becoming in Alcandre's magical grotto and the multiple geographical and conceptual places evoked therein. Racine's dramaturgy constructs the stage as an in-between space of becoming, rather than the claustrophobic enclosure to which it has often been reduced. As the book effects the [End Page 204] transition from poetry and theater to narrative prose, the "chorological" approach remains the same while the problematics of the readings reveal differences in spatial representation (and its alternatives). In L'Astrée, description and narration simultaneously create bucolic landscapes of enclosure and retreat while also expanding space indefinitely toward neoplatonic reflections that take on a cosmic dimension. In other words, the pastoral in d'Urfé takes shape at the intersection of cartography and cosmology. The reading of Lafayette's La princesse de Clèves that concludes the book's body chapters provides the most intriguing insight into how changes in narrative structure track changes in spatial conceptualizations in early modern France. Whereas the pastoral represents landscape while expanding the reflection on space into a cosmic epistemology, the new form of Lafayette's novel accedes to yet another level of abstraction and indeterminacy. Space becomes no longer represented, but rather hinted at, much in the same way that Plato's chora evokes space, and indeed its origination, without constituting it: "[N]arrative prose is supported by the pictorial force of description to formulate dramatic spectacles that evoke the world, that imply it, without directly representing it" (195). Peters's command of not only the early modern primary and theoretical literary sources but also their underpinnings in antiquity culminates in a wide-ranging and carefully documented scholarly study. Roland Racevskis University of Iowa Copyright © 2019 American Association of Teachers of French

Book Review| March 01 2007 The Uses of Curiosity in Early Modern France and Germany The Uses of Curiosity in Early Modern France and Germany. By Neil Kenny. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. xii + 484 pp. Nicholas Paige Nicholas Paige Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Modern Language Quarterly (2007) 68 (1): 119–122. https://doi.org/10.1215/00267929-2006-028 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Nicholas Paige; The Uses of Curiosity in Early Modern France and Germany. Modern Language Quarterly 1 March 2007; 68 (1): 119–122. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00267929-2006-028 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsModern Language Quarterly Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. University of Washington2007 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

In the Introduction to this edited collection, Derval Conroy compellingly charts the importance of early modern French writings in the conceptual history of gender equality. Overshadowed by later centuries, early modern France was passionately animated by debates over differing visions of gender roles and relations, producing a multilayered corpus that has hitherto been confined to ‘women’s history’. This collection seeks to reposition these debates within the wider history of early modern intellectual thought. The eleven essays present wide-ranging perspectives on the history of gender equality from the late sixteenth to the mid-eighteenth centuries in early modern France and beyond as we move from France to England, China, and New France. The interdisciplinary scope of the volume is equally impressive with contributors attending to the political, philosophical, intellectual, literary, social, and historical stakes of the topic. The first three essays examine Cartesian positions on gender equality. Geneviève Fraisse traces Poulain de...

Honour and retribution are just two of the key themes of this investigation into violent behaviour by individuals as well as social groups in Early Modern France. Stuart Carroll provides a detailed analysis of various contexts (family feuds; hereditary questions; adultery, seductions and rape; religious conflict; and the exercise of authority), in which aggression and bloodshed took place, from their inception to their escalation and resolution; he studies its mechanisms and judiciary treatment, and the degrees to which violence was accepted or deemed acceptable. Written in a lucid, punchy style, the study rests on a dazzling — at times bedazzling — array of archival sources and judicial pieces, in the main pardon letters, supplemented with extracts from journals, memoirs and occasionally literary sources. Chronologically, examples range from the late Middle Ages to the end of the reign of Louis XIV. The materials and discussions, however, are arranged around broad thematic rather than chronological lines. The first part, ‘the structure of vindicatory violence’, retraces the deep causes of many disputes, which frequently lay in questions of landownership and rights, as well as in matters of status and reputation. The second theme of the book centres on ‘violence and society’, and tackles questions of hostility and assault in terms of the justice and the law; mediation, arbitration and mercy; and gender and vindicatory violence. In the third part, ‘violence and the polity’, Carroll concentrates on the particularly acute use of aggression in the Wars of Religion, and on the deployment of violence in the centralization processes of the seventeenth century. Carroll's chosen theme places his publication in the wake of pioneering studies of early modern violence (e.g. by Natalie Zemon Davis and Denis Crouzet), while offering also a counterpane to historical enquiries into the rise of the period's gentlemanly and courtly culture, fronted most notably by Elias' The Civilizing Process. Yet in his emphasis on vengeance the author clearly — and successfully — steers an independent course. By its nature, the study will in the first place appeal to cultural and social historians. However, the life-world, conjured up by Carroll, of belligerence and antagonism, which was nonetheless heavily codified, will equally command the attention of literary scholars specializing in Early Modern France. Carroll's investigations provide useful background on any literary treatment of, for instance, the question of duelling (a central theme in Corneille's Le Cid) or on the use of violence against women. (Interestingly, violent acts committed by women surface only very occasionally in this book.) In the course of the narrative, Marguerite de Navarre, Brantôme, L'Estoile, Montaigne and Tallement des Réaux are all called to the witness stand, alongside evidence drawn from the tabulation of ‘deaths of gentlemen in vindicatory actions’ between 1550 and 1659, ‘pardons presented to the Parlement of Aix’ between 1571 and 1720 and the ‘settlements for murdered nobles’. Montaigne's family-in-law, the La Chassaigne, also make a fleeting appearance with an inheritance dispute marked by confessional differences within the family (pp. 294–95); it would have been useful, though, had Montaigne's brother-in-law, Geoffroy de La Chassaigne (p. 294), been identified (or cross-referenced) with the very sieur de Pressac, whose French translation of Seneca's Epistles is evoked on p. 12. A map of the French parlements and 16 well-chosen, if rather grainy, illustrations pleasantly punctuate the book's tidy lay-out. Readers turning to Carroll's Blood and Violence in Early Modern France will indeed find that they have laid their hands on a quality product.

Book Review| January 01 2006 The Uses of Curiosity in Early Modern France and Germany The Uses of Curiosity in Early Modern France and Germany. By Neil Kenny. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. 484 p. Barbara M. Benedict Barbara M. Benedict Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Comparative Literature (2006) 58 (1): 80–83. https://doi.org/10.1215/-58-1-80 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Barbara M. Benedict; The Uses of Curiosity in Early Modern France and Germany. Comparative Literature 1 January 2006; 58 (1): 80–83. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/-58-1-80 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsComparative Literature Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. University of Oregon2006 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Reviewed by: Sin and Salvation in Early Modern France: Three Women's Stories by Marguerite d'Auge, Renée Burlamacchi Jane Couchman SIN AND SALVATION IN EARLY MODERN FRANCE: THREE WOMEN'S STORIES, by Marguerite d'Auge, Renée Burlamacchi, and Jeanne du Laurens. Edited by Colette H. Winn. Translated from French by Nicholas van Handel and Colette H. Winn. The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe: The Toronto Series. Toronto: Iter Press and Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2017. 97 pp. $34.95 paper. Sin and Salvation in Early Modern France: Three Women's Stories, translated by Nicholas van Handel and Colette H. Winn, is a welcome addition to The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe series, offering vivid glimpses of the lives of three very different women of the merchant and professional classes in early modern France. While sin and salvation are indeed important themes, the texts are particularly valuable for the insights they offer into early modern families and the roles of women therein. Renée Burlamacchi's Memoirs Concerning Her Father's Family (1623) and Jeanne du Laurens's The Genealogy of the du Laurens (1631) are nicely matched accounts by proud daughters of their birth families. Burlamacchi's family were Protestants from Lucca, Italy, and her Memoirs Concerning Her Father's Family recount their journey, led by her father Michele, into exile in France and from one refuge to another (Paris, Montargis, Sedan) to escape persecution. They eventually arrived in Geneva, where they joined a community of Italian Protestant exiles. Jeanne du Laurens's family were Catholic, based in Arles, France. Laurens's story centers on the valiant and remarkably successful efforts of her widowed mother, Louise, to arrange for the proper education and placement of her many children, especially her sons. In both accounts, God plays a central role. For Burlamacchi, a Calvinist, hardships were signs that God was testing the elect, and triumphs revealed that God's grace was upholding them, even when using Catholics such as the Duke de Guise to ensure their safety. For the Catholic Laurens, faith in God was accompanied by the use of God-given talents to achieve success. Laurens and her mother were proud that four of her nine brothers became either priests or monks. Both Burlamacchi's and Laurens's works remained in manuscript, appropriately since they were intended as memorials and advice for their immediate families. Marguerite d'Auge's Pitiful and Macabre Regrets (1600) is the anomaly here. Like the other two, it focuses on a family but, in this case, a fatally dysfunctional one. Published as a broadsheet, Pitiful and Macabre Regrets claims to report the words of repentance spoken by d'Auge, a notorious adulteress who plotted with her lover to murder her husband and was condemned to death. The case was infamous, with court records and another account also available, and the broadsheet is clearly written to [End Page 197] sell to a public eager for a vivid account of violence and passion. It is not actually clear whose voice is recorded in the broadsheet; are the words really d'Auge's or are they attributed to her by an anonymous male author? Much of the rhetoric echoes attacks on women surrounding the querelle des femmes (the woman question). The image of d'Auge, as Winn points out, reflects contemporary depictions of the penitent harlot. The lady does indeed protest too much and in too much gory detail, urging other young women to eschew her example. Yet the language of Pitiful and Macabre Regrets does echo d'Auge's own plea as recorded in her trial account, a plea no doubt crafted to win the pity of her judges. All three texts are translated from recent editions of the originals.1 For d'Auge and Laurens, there exists only one original version. For Burlamacchi, the choice of a base text is more complicated. Two manuscripts written in Italian by the author survive, as well as three translations into French. Van Handel and Winn have chosen one of the French translations as their base text rather than one of the original Italian ones; the reasons for this choice and the...

Reviews And Short Notices

This chapter advances three main points: 1) the critical rediscovery of Pietro Aretino in the twentieth century by Guillaume Apollinaire, 2) a close examination of the link between Aretino and the Marquis de Sade with respect to the portrayal of sexual violence, and 3) an analysis of the work Vénus dans le cloître (Venus in the Cloister). This latter narrative serves as an intermediate text that bridges the gap between Aretino and Sade within the continuum of obscene literature in early modern France. The notion of obscenity as it applies to these works is one where licentiousness traditionally portrayed hors scène (out of sight) is transformed to where it is now mise en scène (in plain sight). Apollinaire’s view of obscenity in Aretino is represented in terms of literary sophistication, whereas Sade imitates Aretino’s depiction of both ecclesiastical hypocrisy and brutality in the natural world. Vénus dans le cloître reflects the hypersexualized world of priests and nuns portrayed in Aretino, but breaks from the Italian master by actually defending genuine faith in God and in making the case for sincere, legitimate love. Vénus is best seen as a kind of humanistic text highlighting the faults and merits of human sexuality.

Reviewed by: Die vergessene Sympathie: Zu Geschichte und Gegenwart literarischer Wirkung by Verena Olejniczak Lobsien Katja Haustein Die vergessene Sympathie: Zu Geschichte und Gegenwart literarischer Wirkung. By Verena Olejniczak Lobsien. Paderborn: Brill and Fink. 2022. xvi+497 pp. €59. ISBN 978–3–7705–6706–5 (ebk 978–3–8467–6706–1). In recent years, sympathy and other relational feelings, such as empathy and compassion, have received a surge of scholarly attention (see e.g. Eric Schliesser, Sympathy: A History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015); Fritz Breithaupt, Kulturen der Empathie (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 2009) and Die dunklen Seiten der Empathie (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 2017); Paul Bloom, Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion (New York: Vintage, 2018); and Katherine Ibbett, Compassion's Edge: Fellow-Feeling and its Limits in Early Modern France (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017)). But while sympathy tends to be discussed as a particular mode of intersubjective affection with certain social, ethical, and moral-philosophical implications, Verena Olejniczak Lobsien offers a timely and refreshing contribution to the debate by reminding us that sympathy has not always been understood in the sense of a 'fellow feeling' predominantly, if not solely, associated with humans (Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language, 2 vols (London: printed by W. Strahan for J. and P. Knapton; T. and T. [End Page 239] Longman; C. Hitch and L. Hawes; A. Millar; and R. and J. Dodsley, 1755), s.v.). Focusing on the time period between 1200 and 1700, Lobsien reconstructs early modern conceptions of sympathy that do not restrict the term to human relations, but use it to describe the idea of a general connectivity between animated and (seemingly) inanimate nature, the human and the divine, the soul and the body. As natural sympathy the concept appears as a universal principle, understood as an 'alles mit allem verklammernder organischer Weltzusammenhang' (p. 207: 'organic interrelation that connects every aspect of the world'). Lobsien's study, which is the fruit of the interdisciplinary research project 'Transformationen der Antike: Sympathie. Zur Transformations- und Funktionsgeschichte des Mit-Fühlens zwischen 1600 und 1800', is carefully researched, impressively detailed, and comprehensive, offering an illuminating discussion of sympathy in early modern philosophy, literature, and music, reading less familiar European thinkers alongside canonical writers and composers, including Hildegard von Bingen, Philip Sidney, Andrew Marvell, John Donne, Marsilio Ficino, Anne Conway, Edmund Spenser, and William Shakespeare. The substantial bibliography contains a useful and wide-ranging overview of relevant research in English and German. (However, and this is especially unfortunate for a book of this weight and ambition, there is no subject index that would have helped the reader to navigate more comfortably the wealth of information provided.) Lobsien portrays the history of sympathy as the radical transformation from natural sympathy as a form of oneness with the world to sympathy as a predominantly social affair. In so doing, and in contrast to most of the scholars listed above, she does not critically dissect the concept, but rather embraces it as a particular mode of 'Allteilhabe' ('universal sharing') that we moderns have, if not entirely lost, at least temporarily forgotten. Consequently, the overall tone of the book is nostalgic, with Lobsien establishing a direct link between the loss of natural sympathy (roughly around the turn of the seventeenth century) and the current state of Western civilization, contemplating the Covid crisis and climate change as two outcomes of a process she describes as marked by a growing sense of alienation between us humans and the natural world. In this way, Lobsien's argument resonates with path-breaking accounts of the civilization process as a distancing process, exemplified by the works of Benjamin, Elias, Adorno, and, more recently, Albrecht Koschorke in Körperströme und Schriftverkehr: Mediologie des 18. Jahrhunderts (Munich: Fink, 1999). But in contrast to her predecessors, Lobsien remains vague when it comes to identifying and explaining what may have caused this process. The question what exactly triggered the 'entscheidenden Einbruch' ('critical decline') in the history of sympathy (p. 68) in cultural and mental-historical terms remains largely unanswered, as does the question of how we might retrieve what we have lost (if this is what...

The article discusses the replacement of political competition with political administration in order to maintain the power of the ruling political actors and ensure the tenure of the ruling regime under neo-authoritarian rule in a number of countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America. The administration of all key arenas of the political sphere is implemented through special political technologies and informal practices of political corruption. A pseudo-multiparty system with a dominating ruling party is being constructed in the party-political arena. In the media arena, the most influential mass media are being “nationalized”. In the arena of personnel, through political nepotism, adherents of the ruling regime are placed in key political and administrative positions of public power. In the electoral arena, the institution of elections is transformed into a procedure for the formation of public authorities by manipulating the voting procedures. In the legislative arena, the ruling party provides political administration of legislative and parliamentary activities in general. In the judicial arena, through the administrative regulation of the judiciary personnel, the judicial system is integrated into a single system of neo-authoritarian rule aimed at providing judicial protection for the ruling regime from the discontent of the citizens and using courts for political purposes. To demonstrate the appearance of democratic legitimacy, all neo-authoritarian regimes imitate the work of the basic institutions of democracy.