Virgilian Identities in the French Renaissance

Abstract

Phillip John Usher and Isabelle Fernbach (eds.). Virgilian Identities in the French Renaissance, Gallica, 27. London: Boydell and Brewer, 2012. Pp. 260. Scholars of the French early modern period have not ignored the relationship between Renaissance poetics and the reception of Virgil. It is striking, though, that there has not been much general work on Virgil reception of the sort that the late Philip Ford provided for Homer. This edited volume brings together work by an impressive collection of specialists. It will prove a valuable addition to the literature (complementing important, although venerable, work in French by Alice Hulubei, now more than eight decades old). The collection opens with an elegant, brief foreword by Timothy Hampton and an informative introduction by the two editors that presents a well-structured justification for the project, evoking the medieval Rota Virgilii and its tripartite distinction between the bucolic, the georgic, and the epic modes. The collection groups pastoral and georgic under one rubric (the first section) and the Aeneid is in its own (second) section. An index of authors and their writings is provided; a more compendious index would have been appreciated. Particular standouts include Philip Ford's piece on Virgil reception in Neo-Latin and vernacular humanist circles. Ford's comments about Virgil as the national poet of transnational Latin humanism (at the end of his section on Scaliger) are apt and well articulated. His is a voice much missed. The pieces by Valerie Worth-Stylianou and Todd Reeser are also excellent: the former presenting the results of careful work on Virgil translation, combining elegant close reading and broader comparisons between vernacular editions; the latter, on translating nation, offering a fascinating discussion of the links between literary and national projects in Joachim Du Bellay's writing. Reeser could, in a longer piece, explore the links between mimesis, history, and poetry more broadly. The comments about history and poetry in the posthumous 1587 preface to Pierre de Ronsard's Franciade would be relevant to his argument, for example in the context of the Renaissance reception of Aristotle's Poetics. (I find the emphasis on representation a bit old-fashioned, but this is perhaps a matter of taste.) In the first section, Bernd Renner returns to the question of poetic identity in Clement Marot (and to the well-known Maro/Marot pun, as well), also recently discussed by Florien Preisig and Gerard Defaux; Margaret Harp contributes a good piece, focused on one author, Jacques Yver (it might have been good to have more on Virgil reception during the Wars of Religion in the volume). Michael Randall is very much in his element in his considerations on Rhetoriqueur poetics and particularly Jean Lemaire de Beiges; his article resonates with Stephanie Lecompte's essay, which is a learned (and idiomatically translated) account of the temple of Virtue in French writing of, primarily, the first half of the sixteenth century. …