Publishing in the Republic of Letters: The Ménage-Grcevius—Wetstein Correspondence 1679–1692 ed. by Richard G. Maber

Abstract

232 Reviews tryobsessively to exercise power over each other by controlling each other's thoughts through themanipulation and restriction of language. Chapter I demonstrates the frequencywith which characters dwell on the difficultyof knowing theOther. Chap ter 2 argues thatmoments of confession turn out not tobe sincerely confessional at all. Chapter 3 claims that characters evoke images of violence and death in order to practise mental tortureon their interlocutors. Chapter 4 argues thatRacine's presen tation of death and the afterlife is unusually bleak and rejects Christian notions by dwelling on a lack of redemption. Chapter 5 reads Racine in the lightofGeorge Or well's Nineteen Eighty-Four and suggests thatRacinian characters' manipulation of language and inparticular the restriction of linguistic choice that they seek to impose on their interlocutors (for instance,Antiochus says ofBerenice, 'Ellem'imposa meme un eternel silence') anticipate the tactics of thosewho inOrwell's Ministry ofTruth create new words while destroying hundreds of others as they compile their dictio nary ofNewspeak. Reilly is attempting to define a specifically Racinian thematics of communication which lies at theheart of the bleak picture of humanity thathis plays paint. She sometimes makes helpful distinctions between Racine and Pierre Corneille tosupport her point, though not, interestingly,in thecase ofChapter 4with her claims about Racine's unchristian account of death and the afterlife.She isat pains todistin guish her own work from the large amount ofwriting on Racine's language, stylistic or rhetorical,which she presents as being more technical than thematic.Her own ap proach, however, is far more rhetorical than she acknowledges, since she is interested precisely in the communicative strategies that characters deploy in order to prevail over their interlocutors, and this isprecisely what rhetoric isabout. When Agrippine makes her so-called 'sincere aveu' toNeron, it is,as Reilly says, 'intended not to re lievepain, but to increase it' (p. 53). She intends tobrowbeat her son into submission. And when characters conjure up visions of violence, even the thought of a bloody end, asReilly says, 'can be sufficienttobully characters into submission' (p. 65). This book is also, therefore,a useful contribution to rhetorical studies ofRacine. KEBLE COLLEGE, OXFORD MICHAEL HAWCROFT Publishing in theRepublic ofLetters: The Menage-Grcevius-Wetstein Correspondence I679-I692. Ed. by RICHARD G. MABER. (Studies in theHistory of Ideas in the Low Countries, 6)Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi. 2005. vii + 174 pp. ?40. ISBN 978-90-420-i685-9. Whether considered as an abstract idea or a practical means of communication, the republic of letters in seventeenth-century Europe can be an elusive thing.Yet in Richard G. Maber's new study it isbrought vividly to life,thanks both to the seventy engagingly informal letters that are printed here for the first time and to the sym pathetic and scholarly essay with which Maber introduces them.The protagonist of thebook is theFrench polymath Gilles Menage, famous during his lifetime asmuch for his good looks and social charm as for the extraordinary range of his learning and literary activity.A widely respected etymologist, classical scholar, authority on civil law,historian, and biographer, he was also an untiring controversialist, editor of theworks of poets such as Tasso and Malherbe, and author of amorous verses of his own in four languages. No wonder that Moliere immortalized him as Vadius, the intellectual ladies' man of Les Femmes savants, nor thatBayle praised his ability to combine somuch Greek and grammar with an enviable talent for 'conversation polie et galante aupres des femmes de qualite' (p. 6). The 'liaisons deMr Menage' were evidently well known. But here it is his more scholarly and international contacts thatare the focus of attention.Wishing topromote MLR, 102.I, 2007 233 his work outside France, hewrote in the spring of I679 to a fellow classicist, Johann Georg Grafe, orGraevius, of theUniversity ofUtrecht, with a plea forhelp ingetting a revised edition of his treatise on civil law published inLeipzig. Graevius obliged and thus began a convivial correspondence which was to last until Menage's death almost thirteenyears later.By I68o the twowere planning a new edition ofMenage's commentary on theLives ofEminent Philosophers byDiogenes Laertius, amuch more ambitious project which required the involvement not only of a colleague...