Du Bellay Research Articles

Les Muses sacrées: poésie et théâtre de la Réforme entre France et Italie. Sous la direction de Véronique Ferrer et Rosanna Gorris Camos.

These nineteen essays propose an in-depth examination of Reformation poetry and theatre, two sub-genres that have not drawn much critical attention lately. The overall concentration on aesthetic, stylistic, and thematic choices is meant to shed light on the specificities of Protestant writing, as expressed initially through biblical paraphrases and contrafactum. A clear opposition to mainstream (Catholic) poets as well as partisan and courtly productions such as Ronsard’s Discours, would allow for the establishment of an authentically Christian spiritual poetry without neglecting the erudition and aesthetic renewal characteristic of the Pléiade. This tension results in two distinct directions that Reformation poetry would take, which shows the difficulty in reconciling religious difference and literary traditions: spiritual, confessional, and anti-Ronsard; biblical, irenic, and inspired by Ronsard. It is certainly unfortunate, and this is doubtless the collection’s most regrettable flaw, that polemical productions have been largely left out, although this decision allows for a more homogeneous investigation of the Christian muse. Mario Richter opens the discussion by looking into the concept of grace and its problematic relationship to liberty in Calvinist poets such as Théodore de Bèze, Guillaume de Salluste Du Bartas, or Jean de Sponde. Véronique Ferrer is interested in the didactic functions of poetry, and Max Engammare, along those lines, analyses poems added to Protestant Bible translations. His investigation of paraphrases of the Psalms leads Jean Vignes to affirm the overwhelming influence of poets such as Marot, Ronsard, or Du Bellay on both sides of the confessional divide, similarly to what Letizia Mafale finds with regard to Guillaume Guéroult’s Chansons spirituelles oscillating between Calvinist and humanist influences, or Mariangela Miotti studying Ronsard’s influence on André de Rivaudeau’s poetry. Concetta Cavallini analyses another example of translatio studii, Vittoria Colonna’s spiritual Petrarchism, an approach that Davide Dalmas applies to the Canzone alla Vergine via the Pasquil. Anna Bettoni revisits early Bible translations from an anti-conformist angle, focusing on François Perrot’s Perles d’eslite (1577) and the importance of cultural transmission. Similar aesthetic concerns guide Bruno Petey-Girard’s reading of Pierre Poupo’s Muse chrestienne and the rare periphrastic sonnet. Isabelle Garnier reads Odet de La Noue’s Poesies chrestiennes as a posthumous dialogue with Ronsard, contributing to the appeasement of confessional tensions under Henri IV. Frank Lestringant contributes a reading of the ending of Book 5 of Agrippa d’Aubigné’s Les Tragiques, focusing on the negative transformation of conventional imagery and the ensuing corrective appeal of the inverted world-topos. Two texts of Jean-Baptiste Chassignet lead Michele Mastroianni to the conclusion of the poet’s moderate Catholicism. In the realm of theatre, Olivier Millet explores the potential for evangelical propaganda in the morality play La Vérité cachée. Cultural appropriation, allegory, and comedy inform Eugenio Refini’s reading of Jacques Bienvenu’s Triomphe de Jésus Christ, a translation of the English Calvinist John Foxe’s Christus triumphans. The Christianization of the language of tragedy interests Filippo Fassina (semantic changes, amplificatio, ideological variants). Jean-Claude Ternaux analyses the militant, perverted use of tragedy in Joachim de Coignac’s La Desconfiture de Goliath; Riccardo Benedettini the theme of salvation in Louis Des Masures’s David; and Daniele Spezari closes this rich and readable volume with comments on the interplay of speech and silence in Antoine de La Croix’s Tragi-comédie.

και φτερά: Ο μύθος της Οδύσσειας στη λογοτεχνία και στον κινηματογράφο του μοντερνισμού by Maria Oikonomou

Reviewed by: και φτερά: Ο μύθος της Οδύσσειας στη λογοτεχνία και στον κινηματογράφο του μοντερνισμού by Maria Oikonomou Victoria A. Reuter (bio) Maria Oikonomou (Μαρία Οικονόμου), και φτερά: Ο μύθος της Οδύσσειας στη λογοτεχνία και στον κινηματογράφο του μοντερνισμού [Oars and wings: The myth of the Odyssey in the literature and cinema of modernism]. Athens: Nefeli. 2016. Pp. 352. Paper €21.50. I spurred my comrades with this brief addressto meet the journey with such eagernessthat I could hardly, then, have held them back; and having turned our stern toward morning, wemade wings out of our oars in a wild flight —Dante, Inferno, 26: 121–125 (Mandelbaum 1980) In Maria Oikonomou's Κουπιά και φτερά, oars and wings are more than a titular reference to Dante's Ulysses; they are the central metonymic devices from which her study springs. Oars suggest the modern reader's attempt to navigate the protean slipperiness of myth and its meanings, while wings mark the lines of flight from early versions of the Odyssey. Using postmodern theories of intertextuality and semiotics, Oikonomou's book is one of few works that aims to influence the way we study the reception of classics. Indebted to Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze, her rhizomatic approach structures the book into two definable segments: genealogies of Odyssean myth and their modernist remakings. Oikonomou's theoretical and methodological approaches will challenge the reader; yet scholars of myth, modernism, and postmodern theory will find it multifaceted and stimulating. The first section begins with the prelude "Oars & Wings," which broadly defines modernism as an exercise in freedom, a breaking away from contemporary and past realities. The following 50 pages meticulously survey definitions of myth by Niklas Luhmann, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Hans Blumenberg, Joseph Campbell, Northrop Frye, among others, while the latter half follows distinct genealogies of the Odysseus myth. «Το οδυσσειακό μυθικό πεδίο» (The field of Odyssey mythology) maps out the myth's many incarnations in eight subchapters from «Εικόνα πρώτη: Ανθομηρική και αντι-οδυσσειακή» (Image one: Anti-Homeric and anti-Odyssean) to «Εικόνα όγδοη: Η σχολή του Δάντε (και η αγωνία της επίδρασης)» (Image eight: The Dante school [and the anxiety of influence]). With incredible focus and brevity, Oikonomou covers the immoral Odysseus-as-liar (in the traditions of Ovid, du Bellay, and Goethe), as well as allegorical renderings, including an excellent section on Dante's φυγόκεντρη [End Page 220] (centrifugal) Odysseus, which is juxtaposed with the νόστος (homecoming) obsessed hero. The seventh subchapter nods to English translations of the Odyssey (Chapman, Pope) and their roles in shaping the hero's iconography as an exemplary, likable champion. Oikonomou also catalogues several instances of theme-clusters in other language traditions, such as Nausicaa in German (Goethe). The introduction to the book's second section, «Ρήξεις και ανατροπές» (Ruptures and reversals), contextualizes anxieties around the field of reception. It introduces her argument: these modernist renderings of the Odyssey myth (James Joyce, Jean-Luc Godard, Stanley Kubrick) create a radical poetics. They do not dismantle or imitate classical myth but redefine modes of expression through the creation of new forms both literary (Joyce) and cinematographic (Godard, Kubrick). In the first and longest of these three author studies, Oikonomou approaches Joyce's Ulysses as a hypertext that sends the reader elsewhere, constantly offering other lines of inquiry. Oikonomou revisits extant theories on Joyce's narrative technique, such as parallax and the subjective, often dissonant narratives of the novel's protagonists (Molly Bloom). She draws the reader's attention to the parallel constructions and dialogues between Joyce's novel and developments in theory (Ferdinand de Saussure and Friedrich Nietzsche), as well as literature and technology (Jacques Derrida and the gramophone). The chapter also offers close readings of particular episodes and symbols in Ulysses, devoting sections to Proteus, Aeolus, the Wandering Rocks, the Sirens, and Penelope. Transitioning from literature to film, Oikonomou argues that—like Joyce's Ulysses—Godard's film Le mépris (Contempt) severs the umbilical cord between myth and mimesis. For the uninitiated, Oikonomou presents an excellent overview of Godard's place as an innovator of modernist film (including montage, contradiction, interruption, synecdoche) and draws connections to theories and potential modes of interpretation: Derrida (interstitial), Foucault (heterotopia), Mikhail Bakhtin (polyglossia). She argues that Godard makes synecdotal use of myth through multiple series of images and color (reminiscent of Paul Cézanne's A Modern Olympia [1873–1874]) to create a visual poetics. The end of the film, the blank screen, is not (only) the blank page, the abyss, but...

L’Amiral Claude d’Annebault, conseiller favori de François Ier by François Nawrocki

Reviewed by: L’Amiral Claude d’Annebault, conseiller favori de François Ier by François Nawrocki Susan Broomhall Nawrocki, François, L’Amiral Claude d’Annebault, conseiller favori de François Ier (Bibliothèque d’histoire de la Renaissance, 7), Paris, Classiques Garnier, 2015; paperback; pp. 763; 12 b/w illustrations; R.R.P. €67.00; ISBN 9782812431678. How did an individual rise from a relatively little-known Norman family to manage the government of the French kingdom for the last four years of François I’s reign? François Nawrocki, building upon the work of his doctoral thesis, sets out to uncover the network of resources that Claude d’Annebault drew upon to sustain a lengthy career at the heart of French power. Not much has been written on this rather forgotten figure, perhaps partly because uncovering his life’s work requires reconstruction of sources widely distributed across European archives, and much of his own correspondence is no longer extant. The courtly service system of this period depended on personal relations with a monarch and allowed for the development of forms of friendship and intimacy forged by proximity and shared purpose (that is, the king’s). Despite the use of the term in the work’s title, Nawrocki warns that ‘favourite’ suggests a royal capriciousness to courtly appointments that does not reflect the reciprocal nature of this service relationship. D’Annebault’s military prowess guided much of his political trajectory, right through to his recall to Henri II’s service just before his death in 1552. His career coincided with the intensive military focus of a French court heavily invested in the Italian Wars, which pitted successive monarchs against Charles V. Even its failures aided d’Annebault’s rise. The disastrous losses of the French elite at Pavia in 1525, for example, created early access to power for a crop of counsellors in the orbit of Anne de Montmorency, d’Annebault among them. Administrative, diplomatic, and military roles first in Normandy and then in Piedmont during the 1530s solidified his reputation as a capable and reliable official, eventually rising to leading status alongside Montmorency and Philippe de Chabot, and membership of the elite French order of St Michael. Montmorency’s exile, then Cabot’s death in 1543, left d’Annebault the most powerful male counsellor to serve François I, a [End Page 228] position he maintained until 1547, working alongside François de Tournon and the king’s mistress, Anne de Pisseleu. By the end of his reign, François I had vested in d’Annebault more power than in any other councillor. Nawrocki attempts to provide some measure of the personal qualities of the man whom the king apparently trusted so deeply and for so long. He cites contemporary accounts that speak to d’Annebault’s intelligence, but Nawrocki’s own investigation of his education, epistolary expression, and literary commitment suggests functionality rather than deep intellectual engagement of the kind displayed by Guillaume du Bellay or Montmorency. His Catholic religious practices were traditional, with little evidence that he mobilized his position to advance his beliefs, as his son would later do more explicitly in alignment with the Guise family. While he promoted family members and developed his own domains during his time at the height of power, neither contemporary nor historical reports suggest a reputation for the naked ambition that other favourites of the king evidently displayed. Indeed, d’Annebault mobilized his own financial resources to serve the king, although it was an investment returned with interest. Nawrocki argues in conclusion that d’Annebault’s example demonstrates the series of networks and resources that sustained the royal system of service. Royal favour, he maintains, was a collective enterprise (p. 685) that entailed not only d’Annebault but a wide range of family members, friends, supporters, and retainers. And as such, when d’Annebault fell from grace at the commencement of Henri II’s reign, and his personnel moved to make new alliances in the Guise network, their actions also brought about the possibility of his own re-entry back into royal favour soon after. After seven hundred pages of biography, it still seems...

Poetic Deictics and Extra-Textual Reference (Mallarmé, Scève, Ronsard, Du Bellay)

This study considers the effects of deictics, which are among the expressions called, in recent linguistics, and particularly cognitive pragmatics, ‘procedural’ expressions, in poetic expression in the first person. It examines a variety of examples drawn primarily from the early modern period (Scève, Ronsard, Du Bellay, Muret's and Belleau's commentaries on Ronsard), but with several modern points of comparison (Keats, Mallarmé). The article studies, in particular, the question of extra-textual reference in poetry and poetic commentary, arguing against an anachronistic understanding (based in nineteenth- and twentieth-century ideas about authorship) of the forms of early modern poetic reference and of the varieties of first-person action early modern poetry can instantiate.

Collecting uncollectables: Joachim Du Bellay

Lists of wonders have circulated for millennia. Over and over, such inventories of spectacular man made constructions have been rewritten, re-edited and reimagi-ned. Both the wonders and the lists of wonders, preferably of the seven, have had a profound and long-lasting effect, and have been abundantly imitated, copied and reworked. Renaissance creative thinking was obsessed with the seven wonders of the ancient world, and early-modern Europe experienced a surge of visual and verbal depictions of wonders. This article is about a remarkable list of seven wonders, included in one of Joachim Du Bellay’s canonical poems on Roman antiquities (Antiquités de Rome), published in Paris in 1558. Du Bellay shapes his list of wonders by exploring pat-terns of both repetition and mutability. Almost imperceptibly, he starts suggesting connections between 16th-century Rome and distant civilizations. Through the eyes of a fictive traveller and collector, the poet venerates the greatness and la-ments the loss of ancient buildings, sites and works of art, slowly developing a ver-bal, visual and open-ended gallery, creating a collection of crumbling or vanished, mainly Roman, architecture. This poetic display of ruins and dust in the Eternal City is nourished by the attraction of the inevitable destruction of past splendour and beauty. In the sonnets, Du Bellay imitates classical models and patterns. Whi-le compiling powerful images and stories of destruction, he combines techniques associated with both a modern concept of copy and more ancient theories of co-pia. In this context, this article also explores whether Pliny’s Natural History might be a source for the imaginary collection of lost sites and wonders in Du Bellay’s Antiquités.

Situating La Princesse de Montpensier: Tavernier’s adaptation of Madame de Lafayette

When Bertrand Tavernier discussed his project to make a film adaptation of Madame de Lafayette’s novel La Princesse de Montpensier, he explained the contradictory nature of his project. On the one hand, he wanted to attempt a true account of both the events and the exotic nature of France in the 1550s, but on the other hand, he then added a potentially contradictory challenge to his project, proposing that his camera become ‘contemporary’ to the historical events and feelings depicted while at the same time convincing us that these historical events could be taking place in today’s Paris, and seem completely modern. This ‘chronological contradiction’ between what can be termed the exotic flavour of the Renaissance versus an injection of a flavour of contemporaneity – the endotic – will be examined in the way Tavernier develops the portrayal of the spirit of the Renaissance in language that is particularly resonant with the very terms that both Du Bellay and Ronsard employed to capture the epistemology of their times. This exotic level of the film will then be contrasted with the way Tavernier manages to give us an endotic representation of the Paris of the twenty-first century.

'The Beauty that Kills Me': The Death of Lyric Person and the Birth of the Poet in Joachim Du Bellayys Book of Sonnets the Olive (1550)

The study analyzes Sonnets 63, 65 and 69 as the key texts of the enlarged version of Joachim Du Bellay’s The Olive. In the sequence of sonnets, some loci communes of “love poems” (Amours) such as innamoramento or description of the lady’s beauty form a kind of a “new beginning”. The paper shows how Du Bellay gradually implants the Neoplatonic and religious motifs that link the middle of his new book to its beginning and its end. Another intertextual link, which is explored, is reference to Petrarch’s Canzoniere in the sonnets 63 and 69. If Petrarch’s lyric person regrets his errors leaving him to guiltiness, Du Bellay’s lyric person sees his defeat as Amor’s providence, and the defeat suddenly changes in discovery of heavenly beauty. The study demonstrates that Du Bellay addresses the ideas of Neoplatonism in order to induct and strengthen the vertical opposition of the world of earth (closely linked to suffering) and the world of heaven. Meanwhile, the poet differs from the strict followers of Neoplatonism, insisting that not the lady but Amor is the real converging point between the two worlds.

Editor’s Note

Editor’s Note

La passion pour Guy Le Fèvre de La Boderie et la flamme sombre du “Zohar”

Set against the background of the frequent references to the French and Italian Renaissance scattered in Petits traites – particularly in tome VI – and spanning from Marot to Sceve, from Du Bellay to Montaigne, from Ariosto to Strozzi, this close reading of the text concerning the Norman kabalist erudite and poet Guy Le Fevre de La Boderie (1541-1598) illustrates many recurrent and intertwining themes and images. The sea or riverside (bridges, vessels and shipwrecks), the starlit sky and the color yellow form a highly symbolic hibernal Flemish landscape. Biographical sketches and death scenes, the identification of the author’s life with his work, the solitude and the silent voice of any reader and writer delineate a portrait of the artist. Mystical and philosophical sources and implications of Le Fevre’s work – especially his orphic voyage Encyclie and his Galliade, both structured in circles – are explained in order to draw a parallel between Quignard’s Petits traites and Le Fevre’s linguistic dream of reviving the act of creation by reuniting the whole world in a single word. In so far as they are traces and echoes of an originary alphabet, etymology, anagrammatism and toponymy stand out among the means of an obsessive investigation in, and restoration of, the sacred essence of nomination. Defined by the ascensional spirals in his work, Guy’s “passion” is a transcendental quest and, at the same time, an obsessive illusion.

The Spanish Golden Age Sonnet transed. by John Rutherford

Reviewed by: The Spanish Golden Age Sonnet transed. by John Rutherford Patrick J. Murray The Spanish Golden Age Sonnet, ed. and trans. John Rutherford (Cardiff: University of Wales Press 2016) 288 pp. The vexed issue of literary translation has stimulated the minds of a wide diversity of writers and critical theorists. From John Dryden to Paula Gunn Allen, Jorge Luis Borges to Houston A. Baker Jr., Joachim du Bellay to John Knox, many figures have sought to celebrate and denigrate, propagandize and dismiss, interrogate and explicate the act of modulating text from one language into another. This is unsurprising, if we consider what translation entails. Incorporating principally engagement and interchange between two discrete languages, it also involves engagement and interchange between texts, writers, cultural contexts of production, and even reader responses. While grimly rendered in David Wyllie's translation as "One morning, when Gregor Samsa woke from troubled dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a horrible vermin," the first line in the original of Franz Kafka's Metamorphosis purportedly had its first German-speaking readers rolling around the floor in fits of laughter, exemplifying how the moving of one piece of writing from one language to another can have a profound effect on its reception. Complexities accompanying the act of translation are doubly intensified when considered within the parameters of verse, and in particular a form as tightly-bound as the sonnet. For here, as John Rutherford observes in his new edited collection of Spanish Golden Age poetry, the translator is seemingly faced with a lose-lose situation: "Conventional wisdom insists that translators of sonnets have to choose between reproducing form and reproducing content, […] [and as a consequence] simultaneous accuracy in both areas is impossible" (12). What one gains in verbal accuracy or fidelity to the source text, one (almost inevitably) loses in relation to the key features of form—cadence of metre and musicality of rhyme. In The Spanish Golden Age Sonnet, Rutherford seeks to address this dilemma of translation by adopting aspects of both methods. In the first instance, he attempts to utilise sonnet modes with a long tradition in the English language, namely Shakespearean and Petrarchan, allied with a maintenance of iambic pentameter rhythm. In the second, linguistic aspect, Rutherford attempts to approximate closely the source language while revelling in the "new insights" brought about by the differences between Spanish and English. "If […] we think of the original work as the best that a fallible human being could manage in circumstances that were inevitably trammelled by linguistic, cultural and personal limitations," writes Rutherford, "our attitude to literary translation will be different" (13). Ultimately the author attempts to "rewrite" the poems of lyricist such as Garcilaso de la Vega, Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Luis de Góngora and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz "as I imagine their authors would have written them had they been twenty-first century English poets" (16). Such an aim is, as Rutherford himself freely admits "immodest, impossible and perhaps absurd" (16). Nonetheless, it provides a context in which to judge [End Page 269] the success of Rutherford's translation, for if the very act of translating itself eludes standardised critique, authorial intention at least offers (in the case of translation if in no other) a framework in which to consider the volume on its own merits. And Rutherford's work is a lively and engaging take on some of the finest poetry in the Spanish language. Perhaps the collections strongest point is its accessibility. Rhetorical flourishes inherent in the source text and made possible by the etymological roots of the source language, such as Góngora's hyperbaton, are reconfigured to interpose a readable, elegant syntax. Moreover, Rutherford's retention of rhyme is a fundamental positive—the musical qualities of sonneteering are a vital (in every sense of that word) aspect of the form. Meanwhile each entry is burnished by a pen biography of the writers translated, detailing their life, works and influences. Accessible and erudite, these sections help to illuminate the sources of the translated poems and their colourful lives. Here, the uninitiated reader unfamiliar with the milieu anthologised learns of the close relationship between Juan Bosc...

Transmuting Dido: Marot, Du Bellay and the Displacement of Ovidian and Virgilian Authority in Translatio

Among classical heroines, the figure of Dido pervades the works of Renaissance writers and contemporary reflections on exemplarity. French humanist poets Clement Marot and Joachim Du Bellay exploit this ambivalent and topical figure to emulate and displace as authors Virgil and Ovid (Aeneid III–IV; Heroides VII). Beyond translation as transcription (traductio), the poetic, political and ethical appropriations penned by Marot and Du Bellay reveal clear ties to translatio studii et imperii. In Marot’s Epistre de Maguelonne (1532) and Du Bellay’s verse triptych centred on Dido (1552), traditional points of praise and blame are subverted and displaced, while conflicting themes and ends surround the polysemy of translatio and the related question of poetic authority in the French sixteenth century. Pagan love, the locus of strong ambivalence (mad vs. virtuous), is transmuted. A dynamic of conversion (Marot) and compensation (Du Bellay) emerges. It bolsters a new French appropriation of ancient models driven by fantasies of moral superiority, political autonomy, literary legitimacy (minors/auctores), and individual mastery. More generally, the interplay between poetic creation, power, and displacement, offers a glimpse into how ambitious vernacular translations frame and appropriate major works.

«Un indéfinissable regret». Lionello Sozzi et les ailes de l’âme

This contribution is a tribute in memory of Lionello Sozzi. The A. highlights the European dimension and dramatic-moral tension implied in his critical works, particularly in his writings on Humanism, then goes beyond the dignitas concept to illustrate some moments of Jacques Grévin’s activity – writer, doctor and Protestant. Thus, the core of this essay is a deeper insight into Grévin’s works (from the Gélodacrye to the treaties and scientific translations, such as the works about Ochino, Wier, Nicandro, to the lesser-known texts dedicated to the great ladies, Chants, Pastorales and Tombeaux). The study of the sources, based on meticulous archival researches, leads Rosanna Gorris Camos to, first of all, analyse a matter dear to Lionello Sozzi and which can also be connected to the consciousness of Grévin’s contemporaries (Marot, Dolet, du Bellay): i.e., the exile matter, where the dignitas is transposed into miseria hominis. As the A. shows, the case of Grévin, with his exile in Elizabeth I’s England and in Margaret of France’s Savoy, crystallizes fears and anxieties concerning humankind at the time: the risk is to no longer distinguish «entre le vrai et le faux, mais aussi entre la vraie sagesse et la fausse sagesse, car la sagesse humaine n’est que vanité».

La langue mondiale: traduction et domination par Pascale Casanova

Reviews 235 the reported message. The diachronic studies analyze the semantics and evolution of a range of expressions, such as puisque and il m’est avis que, commonly found in earlier stages of French. Scholars, editors, and translators of historical texts will find useful insights including, for example, the importance and reliability accorded to dreams and visions in the Middle Ages; speakers’certainty in the veracity of dreams is reflected linguistically in the marking of evidentiality. The volume largely succeeds in demonstrating the interplay of médiativité, polyphonie, and modalité, while revealing subtle semantic and pragmatic properties of a range of high-frequency constructions. Authentic corpora data complement careful analyses, although the acceptability judgments proffered in one study of Old French are suspect and demand further justification: By definition, native speakers are not available for this stage of the language. Globally, one wishes that the findings had been related more thoroughly to previous work on these issues, either in French or more broadly. Nevertheless, the volume is a worthwhile addition to university libraries, and individual chapters could find their place in graduate or advanced undergraduate courses on French linguistics. University of California, Santa Cruz Bryan Donaldson Casanova, Pascale. La langue mondiale: traduction et domination. Paris: Seuil, 2015. ISBN 978-2-02-128060-9. Pp. 130. 18 a. The 2016 Semaine de la langue française et de la francophonie offered yet another forum to keen the Cassandra-like prophecies of the fall of the French language, a victim of Anglo-Saxon imperialism.With this oft-repeated trope in mind, I cautiously opened Casanova’s volume. Happily, the reflexive list of proscribed Anglicisms was absent. Instead, the author presents a carefully articulated, textually-based argumentation framed by translation theory and furnishing a powerful perspective on the notions of linguistic and cultural dominance. Although Casanova acknowledges the desirability of linguistic diversity, she insists that diachronically, languages have been hierarchized according to their proximity to power and prestige. The directionality of translation signifies the value of the respective languages in the linguistic marketplace: Thus, translation typically proceeds from a nonprestigious language to the dominant language. Casanova begins her case studies in the Middle Ages, when Latin was the instrument of the Church, civic affairs, and knowledge-producers. Later, Du Bellay’s Défense et illustration (1549) sought to enrich the language and assert its domination, in part through an appropriation of Latin lexical items. Such an act should be accomplished by translators-as-embellishers, who increase linguistic capital rather than by faithful copiers. Whereas Du Bellay referred to translation as an act of pillage, English Renaissance translators, drawing on French as well as the Classics, referred to “conquest,” a “hijacking of wealth and power” (67). Their activity was that of the “ornamentalist” who enriched, rather than labored as a hack to fidelity. It was only with nineteenth-century German philosophers and poets that the goal of fidelity became primal. Through the agency of fidelity, German would accumulate its capital, becoming the unique language of reference, the“Latin of Moderns.” Returning to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Casanova considers the subversion of fidélité by the invention of les belles infidèles, the aesthetic adaptation of classical works to the mœurs of the period. Their appearance coincided with the rise of the literary salon, animated by women who often lacked access to classical texts. As a final case study, Casanova analyzes the offensive posture of Giaocomo Leopardi (1798–1837) in his attempt to destabilize the dominance of French. Italian’s spontaneity and audacity are a useful foil to the sterile“reason”governing French production. Casanova’s conclusion rejoins contemporary concerns, lamenting not only the dominance of English, but also the effacement of translators. Their production is viewed as self-evident, a mere rendering of facile textual relationships. Casanova’s volume impresses and delights with its rigorous focus on texts, complemented by insightful reflections on the signifying power of languages in the act of translation. Her démarche, couched in Bourdieu’s sociological framework, offers powerful insights into the dynamics of linguistic hierarchies. Yet her conclusion disappoints: Condemning the linguistic domination of English, Casanova offers no remedy. Perhaps globalization has institutionalized the linguistic marketplace...

Status, Power, and Identity in Early Modern France: The Rohan Family, 1550–1715 by Jonathan Dewald

Dewald, Jonathan. Status, Power, and Identity in Early Modern France: The Rohan Family, 1550–1715. University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 2015. ISBN 978-0271 -06616-5. Pp. 264. $75. Perhaps it was du Bellay’s 1549 Défense that convened the writings on paper that established seventeenth-century France—fraught with nascent, unfolding conventions , and upstarts and false starts—upon stone. But none should expect the French scholar to approach history with the straight rigidity of the pillars that erected the French academies of the time, because history bends. Between paper and stone, we receive Dewald’s study of the Rohan family. His work not only thoroughly and successfully examines the particular social history of a prominent family in early-modern France, it also presents history as the resultant, organic movements of a thing thrown against diametrically opposed materials. Between time and physical space, for example, his work on seventeenth-century France eventually moves us to (re)interpret current notions of dominance and power in our society. Starting as early as the year 1000 and ending in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, Dewald narrates the creation of the Rohan identity, a process that moved between imagined and real alliances with powerful ancestors; actual inner conflicts with living relatives; and political and religious principalities that threatened to out the family as untrustworthy of both credit and credibility. Dewald argues that the dominance of the Rohan family was not fed by blood, but by ideologies based on strategy, myth, persuasion, and luck. He also presents notions of change and stasis—otherwise considered as mutually incomprehensible—as opposing materials that form a symbiotic relationship, both fulfilling perpetual, requisite functions needed to guarantee their existence. It is, in fact, movements between seemingly diametric opposites that rhythmed the life of Duke Henri de Rohan, the central figure in the book. Between his father’s absence and his mother’s ballet; the politics of man, and the religions of God; between public spaces, and isolation; between war and exile; the noise of barbarous actions, and the silence of reasoned philosophy; somewhere between the tradition of sexism and sexual oppression, and the fear of powerful women, and the female sex, Dewald shows how Rohan’s reputation was written on paper, and his image carved in stone at Geneva’s St. Pierre Cathedral. Dewald’s work—for its keen attention to the multiple stimuli that influenced the Rohan’s particular history—is beneficial to social historians and contributes widely to early-modern French studies, namely to the fields of politics, economics, religion, and women and gender studies. Though Dewald does not venture to reveal specific applications of his work to current discourse on status, power, and identity, one discovers constructive interpretative frameworks to define privilège, a term that has become a part of popular cultural conversations today. Of particular importance, one notes that Dewald’s work, for the same reasons mentioned above, fully complements studies of French literature of the early-modern period. The representation of Henri de Rohan gives the courtly agitations of Madame de La Fayette’s 242 FRENCH REVIEW 89.4 Reviews 243 Princesse new meaning. The contexts of social mobility and dangerous ambition that staged the demise of La Fontaine’s grenouille, for example, are better understood. Sewanee: The University of the South Julian Ledford Duyker, Edward. Dumont d’Urville: Explorer & Polymath. Honolulu: UP of Hawai‘i, 2014. ISBN 978-0-8248-5139-2. Pp. 671. $69. Duyker’s book is a detailed account of French admiral Dumont d’Urville’s three voyages of exploration in the South Pacific, Australia, New Zealand, and Antarctica. The first journey was on the ship Coquille in 1823–26; the second and third, under his own command, on the Astrolabe in 1827–29 and 1837–40. These expeditions were undertaken under the official sponsorship of the French royal governments of Louis XVIII, Charles X, and Louis-Philippe, respectively. Besides being sent on missions of exploration, he was commissioned to find out about the circumstances surrounding the death of his predecessor La Pérouse and his crew in 1778. He was also entrusted with the secret task of scouting out possible locations for penal colonies similar...

Virgilian Identities in the French Renaissance

Virgilian Identities in the French Renaissance

Lyric in the Renaissance: from Petrarch to Montaigne

Moving from a definition of the lyric to the innovations introduced by Petrarch's poetic language, this study goes on to propose a new reading of several French poets (Charles d'Orleans, Ronsard, and Du Bellay), and a re-evaluation of Montaigne's understanding of the most striking poetry and its relation to his own prose. Instead of relying on conventional notions of Renaissance subjectivity, it locates recurring features of this poetic language that express a turn to the singular and that herald lyric poetry's modern emphasis on the utterly particular. By combining close textual analysis with more modern ethical concerns this study establishes clear distinctions between what poets do and what rhetoric and poetics say they do. It shows how the tradition of rhetorical commentary is insufficient in accounting for this startling effectiveness of lyric poetry, manifest in Petrarch's Rime Sparse and the collections of the best poets writing after him.

La Librairie de Montaigne: Proceedings of the Tenth Cambridge French Renaissance Colloquium, 1-4 September 2008

Reconstituting the library of Michel de Montaigne has long been a fantasy for those working on the relentlessly referential essayist. This important set of essays comes out of a colloquium marking the gift to Cambridge University Library of the precious collection of books about and belonging to Montaigne that the bibliophile and financier Gilbert de Botton spent years assembling, and which the late Philip Ford was instrumental in securing for Cambridge. It includes editions of Montaigne's Essais owned by Ben Jonson and Rousseau; works by contemporaries of Montaigne; and — sending a frisson down the spine of any Montaigniste — ten works (or possibly nine, depending on your stance on the attribution of an edition of Du Bellay's Les Regrets) that we know belonged to the essayist. These include his annotated copy of Denis Lambin's 1563 Lucretius edition, and copies of editions he is known to have possessed even if his personal copy remains elusive. The longed-for reconstitution of Montaigne's library is today one step closer owing to the groundbreaking ‘Montaigne à l'œuvre’ project (http://www.bvh.univ-tours.fr/Montaigne.asp), which also acknowledges the role played by de Botton's bequest and by the Librairie de Montaigne colloquium in the genesis of a hugely important resource for Montaigne scholars. Philip Ford and Neil Kenny state that the shared thread of the chapters is their investigation of ‘material traces, produced by hand or print, that can be interpreted to yield insights into how Montaigne read, thought, composed’ (p. xvi). The contributions are varied in topic and methodology. They range from enlightening accounts of how important Greek and Italian works were to Montaigne as a reader and writer (Philip Ford, Richard Cooper), to exquisite analysis of the role of a six-line borrowing from Catullus (Emily Butterworth); from Paul Nelles's riveting scrutiny of a bookseller's inventory, which vividly recreates Montaigne the young bibliophile scouring Bordeaux's bookshops, to Philip Desan's use of quantitative analysis to uncover Montaigne's revisions; from André Tournon's persuasive account of how the evidence of Montaigne's annotations on his Lucretius point to an idiosyncratic, shifting, and far from binary reading of this most controversial of texts, to John O'Brien's compelling investigation of the subversive nature of Montaigne's reading of pseudo-Anacreon. The collection is particularly rich for its reflections, implicit and explicit, on methodology. O'Brien uses his account of Montaigne's reading methods to reflect on our own, and to warn against a danger that is especially strong with the Essais: namely that Montaigne scholarship, spoilt by the countless proofs we have of his reading and writing, too easily overlooks potential intertexts that, in the case of any other author, would take pride of place in a study of sources. This is compounded in the cases, such as Montaigne's annotated Lucretius, where material evidence converges with our own tastes, and can lead, as Cooper implies, to the relative neglect of works that might seem to us rebarbative but which were livres de chevet for sixteenth-century readers (p. 44). A further quality of this collection — which warrants an ex libris from any serious Montaigne scholar — is its effort to draw our attention to less-studied aspects of Montaigne's reading, of which Marie-Luce Demonet's account of Montaigne's use of contemporary French vernacular philosophy is a fine illustration.

The Poetics of Literary Transfer in Early Modern France and England

The Poetics of Literary Transfer in Early Modern France and England

The Intersexed Intertext: Du Bellay’s Appropriation of Bradamante’s Lyric Laments

The Intersexed Intertext:Du Bellay’s Appropriation of Bradamante’s Lyric Laments Jessica DeVos (bio) In a study of Pierre de Ronsard and Pontus de Tyard, Cathy Yandell considers why a male author might adopt a female poetic voice by seeking to answer the question, “To what extent are these created females typical of contemporaneous women?” (66). She explores Ronsard’s and Tyard’s poems by “examining the extent to which Ronsard and Tyard succeed in creating convincing female narrators” (67). Yandell thus prepares an engaging yet precarious venture into social inquiry. Who is a convincing female narrator? What are our expectations of an “authentic” female voice? Moreover, do any sixteenth-century poets—male or female—succeed in representing their speakers as contemporary women? Do they even attempt to fashion such poetic personae? In order to define what constitutes a convincing female narrator, Yandell departs from the familiar definition of écriture féminine. She adopts instead one of the six criteria stipulated by Gisèle Mathieu-Castellani in her definition of l’écriture du féminin—the quality of reciprocity—and adds that the author must be a woman and acknowledge her status as female.1 [End Page 881] According to this final criterion, Ronsard and Tyard would seem to be excluded a priori from l’écriture du féminin, but this theoretical impasse is resolved by substituting the sex of the poetic persona for that of the author: Only two of the categories, 2) reciprocity and 7) an acknowledgment of the author’s status as female, apply emphatically to these poems. … Both Ronsard’s and Tyard’s speakers acknowledge their status as female within the poems. (Yandell 67, my emphasis) Yandell then examines in greater detail the requirement of reciprocity, illustrating how both Ronsard and Tyard succeed initially in maintaining a “feminine” rhetoric of shared passion with the beloved. She proceeds to argue, however, that the authors’ displays of classical erudition ultimately undermine convincing lyric transvestism. When the male poets hide behind Latin sources, rather than fashioning voices that reflect those of contemporary women, they reveal the true theme of their works — poetic competition between male authors. Yandell’s observation that Ronsard and Tyard are primarily interested in exhibilitng their poetic prowess is astute. However, I am reluctant to exclude women writers from participation in this literary phenomenon. Evocations and resonances of classical topoi abound in the works of Renaissance women poets. Female authors also frequently conflate their amorous and poetic superiority in order to assert preeminence in both domains. In Elégie 2, for example, Labé’s female speaker famously reminds her absent beloved that if he has betrayed her by falling in love with another woman, this other woman will never love him as much as she does, nor will she be able to bring him as much glory and honor by association: Si toutefois pour estre enamouréEn autre lieu, tu as tant demeuré,Si say je bien que t’amie nouvelleA peine aura le renom d’estre telle,Soit en beauté, vertu, grace et faconde,Comme plusieurs gens savans par le mondeM’ont fait à tort, ce croy je, estre estimee.Mais qui pourra garder la renommee?Non seulement en France suis flatee,Et beaucoup plus, que ne veux, exaltee. [End Page 882] La terre aussi que Calpe et PyreneeAvec la mer tiennent environnee,Du large Rhin les roulantes areines,Le beau païs auquel or’te promeines,Ont entendu (tu me l’as fait à croire)Que gens d’esprit me donnent quelque gloire.… jamais femme ne t’aymera,Ne plus que moy d’honneur te portera. (55–68, 73–74, my emphasis)2 Like Ronsard’s and Tyard’s female personae, Labé’s speaker in Elégie 2 also unequivocally declares that her love triumphs over all others. Indeed, the female poet’s repeated evocations of her illustrious reputation ultimately overshadow the importance of her own sentiments. The insistence upon her renowned talents is particularly emphasized in lines 59–62 where the final syllables of each line highlight her fame: estimee, renommee, flatee, exaltee. Although she occasionally employs a modesty topos, claiming that she is simply repeating what others have told her...

Latently Gallic: Locus amœnus and the Prurient Verse of the Mature Pontus de Tyard

Latently GallicLocus amœnus and the Prurient Verse of the Mature Pontus de Tyard Robert J. Hudson Pontus de Tyard (c. 1521–1605), who consistently figures among the core of Pierre de Ronsard’s oft-changing list of Pléiade poets, is nonetheless one of the less frequently studied.1 This comparative lack of critical attention has led to reductive and distorted classifications drawn mainly from Tyard’s earliest publications and biographical details. Given the proximity of the young Mâconnais lyricist to the école lyonnaise of Maurice Scève and his friendship with publisher Jean de Tournes (whose Lyon-based press produced both Il Petrarca in 1545 and Tyard’s Erreurs amoureuses in 1549), Tyard is often seen as a strict, orthodox adherent of Petrarchan giovenile errore and innamoramento. Bearing resonant echoes of Petrarch and Scève, the bulk of the first two editions of Tyard’s Erreurs amoureuses (1549, 1551) follow a Neoplatonic thematics, favor the sonnet and carry a certain lyrical gravitas. As his most celebrated and commented work, the critical emphasis on the Petrarchist dimension of the Erreurs has had the effect of distorting both our understanding of Tyard and his poetic influences. As François Rouget laments, “Pour beaucoup de critiques, Pontus de Tyard restera le poète des Erreurs amoureuses, œuvre de jeunesse correspondant le plus fidèlement au Canzoniere de Pétrarque.”2 Others, citing his cosmological treatises and philosophical engagement with the Neoplatonism of Ficino, Pico and Hebreo, classify Tyard “[s]elon les catégories de la Renaissance [. . .] à la fois un poète et un philosophe,”3 with the latter often coloring critical perception of the former. Additionally, as recently illustrated in the title of Pontus de Tyard: poète, philosophe, théologien,4 critics also focus on Tyard’s ecclesiastical calling, as he was named évêque de Chalon-sur-Saône in 1578, an appointment he would hold for two decades.5 When contrasted with the Epicureanism of Ronsard or the nationalistic chauvinism of Du Bellay, Tyard has traditionally been considered [End Page 1] the most serious, Italianate, Neoplatonic and morally austere of the Pléiade poets. Eclipsed from view is the earthy nature of Tyard’s mature (post-1555) verse poetry. Two Tyard poems in particular, the “Mâconnais Baphire”6 sonnet (XXIII from the third book of the Erreurs amoureuses) and the ode to “Les Roses de son Isle” (from his Vers liriques), illustrate an essential undercurrent that can best be described as Gallic. In the sonnet, Tyard grafts the quintessentially Petrarchan form into his native Bissy—not necessarily to glorify the French language, as did Du Bellay, but to consecrate his own regional Mâconnais as a poetic locus amœnus. Set on an island rose garden, the ode marries classical mythology to Gallic tendencies, as we perceive a pronounced element of eroticism that many have largely overlooked.7 Not only does a re-evaluation of Tyard’s mature verse push back against labels of Petrarchan sobriety and chastity, it also nuances the question of emergent notions of local and national identity and the nature of Gallicism. I. Renaissance Gallicism, Terroir, and Tyardian Wanderings between Lyon and Paris My use of the modifier “Gallic” carries with it familiar medieval notions of a light-hearted, ribald joie-de-vivre, infused with “that pungent blend of naïveté and cunning, of heavenly aspirations and earthly appetites,”8 which are staples of French literature from Marie de France and Chrétien de Troyes to Jean de Meun, Rutebeuf, Villon, and Rabelais. However, central to Gallicism, I would argue, is also a pronounced attachment to and fierce sense of preservation of terroir. A modern term generally reserved for agriculture or gastronomy, the idea of terroir is also befitting a Gallicism founded on identification with ancestral holdings and a belief that individuality derives from an existential relationship with one’s geographical location.9 In the Renaissance, this proves especially true when we consider the widely spread practice among poets of signing verse production with a mark of locale.10 That Tyard readily adopted the label of “seigneur de Bissy” (or “Bissiani”) for his works is indicative of a profound sense of...