Une Histoire Research Articles

Histoire ecclésiastique (review)

Reviewed by: Histoire ecclésiastique Jonathan Armstrong Socrate de Constantinople Histoire ecclésiastique Traduction par Pierre Périchon et Pierre MaravalSources chrétiennes 477 [Book I] and 493 [Books II–III]Paris: Les Éditions du Cerf, 2004/2005 Pp. 267/366. €27/30. Socrates Scholasticus, the first of the three famed continuators of Eusebius's Historia Ecclesiastica, compiled his seven-volume work during the fourth decade of the fifth century. The present French translation follows the critical edition of the Greek text published by Günther Christian Hansen in 1995 (GCS). Pierre Maraval's concise and informative footnotes render the Sources chrétiennes edition worth the additional effort for English readers. Neither of the English translations available, whether the anonymous version of 1844 (Bohn's Ecclesiastical Library) [End Page 124] or the 1890 revision of this translation by A. C. Zenos (NPNF), was based on critical editions. Further, both closely followed the now antiquated notes of Valesius originally published in 1668. Volume I (SC 477) includes a twenty-six page introduction, featuring a biographical sketch of Socrates, an essay outlining his historical project, and a few paragraphs on manuscript transmission. In the footnotes to the main text, Maraval furnishes the reader with ample bibliography, and he painstakingly reconstructs Socrates' use of sources, commenting on his dependence on and divergence from the narratives of Eusebius, Rufinus, Sozomen, Theodoret, Philostorgius, Athanasius, et al. Volume II (SC 493) does not include an independent introduction. Socrates' express purpose in composing his history was to correct Eusebius's presentation of the Arian crisis (I.1.1–2), an episode that all but consumes books I and II of his oeuvre. He at first relied upon Rufinus for his report on the crisis, but after discovering Athanasius's apologies and becoming aware of factual errors in Rufinus's work, Socrates rewrote books I and II completely (II.1.1–4). Socrates' vigilance in guarding the accuracy of his account of the Arian crisis substantiates his claim that he considered it to be of greatest thematic significance for his history. He also criticizes Eusebius's brevity in recounting the rise of Manichaeism (I.22.2). In Eusebius's failure to record the testimony of the Novatian bishop Acesius at the Council of Nicea, Socrates believed himself to have discovered a sinister prejudice against the Novatians (I.10.5). His persistent reporting on sects and heresies alike has led certain scholars to question his orthodoxy, and Maraval recommends Martin Wallraff's proposal that Socrates was in fact a Novatian (Der Kirchenhistoriker Sokrates, 1997). Whereas Eusebius's historiography is oriented towards the development of orthodoxy, Socrates' vision of church history is focused on the divisions among Christians. Maraval even quips that without factions within the church, the church historian would have nothing to write about (I.18.15)! His conclusion merits quotation: "Non peut-être sans quelque anachronisme, on pourrait dire que Socrate veut écrire une histoire du christianisme sous tous ses aspects plutôt qu'une histoire de l'Église, ce qui n'était certainement pas la conception d'Eusèbe, pour lequel il n'y a qu'une Église" (15–16). The first three books of Socrates' history represent a rich source of information concerning Athanasius's dramatic career. Socrates recounts his altercations with Arius, his repeated exiles from Alexandria, and the slanderous and sometimes ridiculous accusations of his politically powerful enemies. The charge that forced Athanasius into exile for the first time, for example, was that he had amputated Arsenius's hand for the purposes of divination (I.27.18). Together with the inspiring accounts of Athanasius's personal courage, Socrates draws up a play-by-play diagram of the councils that anticipates the final victory of Nicene-Constantinopolitan orthodoxy, including the councils of Antioch, Sardica, Sirmium, Milan, Rimini, Seleucia, Constantinople, and Alexandria. His reporting on the councils may lack the luster of modern journalism, but he renders a valuable service to future historians in reproducing the credos achieved at each conclave. One wonders whether Socrates, who viewed "tromperie dialectique" as the true villain of church history (I.18.15), actually intended his reader to be irritated by [End Page 125] the tiresome repetition of the...

Remembering the French Resistance: <em>Ethics and Poetics of the Epic</em>

From its very inception to the present day the French Resistance has been represented and commemorated in the epic mode. While Laurent Douzou's book, La Résistance française: Une histoire périlleuse, reaffirms this heroic vision, Pascal Convert's sculpture honoring executed Resistance fighters on Mont Valérien and his documentary film Mont Valérien, aux noms des fusillés propose a more human, even anti-heroic approach which nevertheless aims to unite a community in memory by celebrating the courage and sacrifice, but also the specific persons, of previously forgotten résistants. The poetics of memory implicit in Convert's works are emblematic of a more general evolution of sensibilities, since contemporary disinterest in the virtues of the warrior and a concomitant preference for recovering the humanity of war's victims can be best understood in reference to the successive trauma of World War I and the Holocaust.

Violence psychologique. Réalité clinique et fiction romanesque

The question of violence and of danger in psychiatry has been raised quite often these last few months within the Société Médico-Psychologique. The author has chosen to focus her reflexion on psychological violence and, more particularly, on the ascendancy or hold that some parents have on their children. This theme will be illustrated by examples taken from clinical facts and from literary fiction and the literature will echo the psychotherapeutic clinical observations. Some clinical observations do indeed resemble novels, and correspondingly fiction that presents secret grief unveils psychological truths by wording the souls' pains. Writing may, in this way, help exorcise what is intolerable in suffering and anguish: hate and rage burst out in Vipère au Poing, cruelty and humiliation are the daily lot of Poil de Carotte, possessive love becomes murderous love in Genitrix and in Une Histoire sans Nom. Kafka shows the terrifying power of words in The Judgement, a short story feverishly written in a single night. The intrication of love and hate may thus, under cover of duty and virtue, borrow the language of altruism: “It's for your own good”… The parental relation may become deadly, words wound and sometimes kill. Far from always being selfless and kindly sometimes love is destructive by dint of trying to be possessive. It can result in permanent scars which may be masked by social success covering up the soul's grief by a falsely reassuring veil.

In Search of Gudrun Goodman: Reflections on Gender, 'Doing History' and Memory

In Search of Gudrun Goodman:Reflections on Gender, 'Doing History' and Memory C. Lesley Biggs (bio) and Stella Stephanson (bio) Abstract Gudrun Goodman was an Icelandic midwife who practised in the Quill Lakes district in Saskatchewan at the turn of the twentieth century. Although little is known about her, she has been celebrated through commemorative practices and artifacts in vernacular culture (an obituary, a gravestone, a descendant's recounting of the past, and a family photograph). Central to the stories generated about Gudrun Goodman is the symbol of the pioneer, which is mediated by narratives of immigration, settlement, and colonization constituted by and constitutive of vernacular and official cultural expressions. This paper reflects on our journey to uncover the inflected meanings of these stories. Presented with the challenge of not having an archive, this study explores the gendered nature of commemorative practices and the importance of vernacular culture to doing women's history. Résumé Gudrun Goodman était une sage-femme islandaise qui pratiquait dans le district de Quill Lakes, en Saskatchewan, au tournant du XXe siècle. Bien que l'on en sache peu sur Gudrun Goodman, elle a fait l'objet de nombreuses célébrations dans le cadre de diverses pratiques commémoratives et au moyen d'artéfacts de la culture vernaculaire (une rubrique nécrologique, une pierre tombale, une histoire racontée par un descendant et une photo de famille). Le symbole de la pionnière, qui est propagé par des récits portant sur des questions d'immigration, d'établissement et de colonisation que l'on retrouve dans des expressions culturelles officielles et vernaculaires, constitue un élément central des histoires créées au sujet de Gudrun Goodman. Cet article fait état de notre tentative visant à découvrir la signification véhiculée par ces histoires. Cette étude, que nous avons choisi de présenter bien que l'absence d'archives constitue un défi, aborde la nature sexuée des pratiques commémoratives ainsi que l'importance de la culturelle vernaculaire dans l'histoire des femmes. It is a typical hot July day in Saskatchewan. Cumulus clouds billow across the deep blue sky and the wind hurtles across the fields. Fields of canola, flax, oats, and wheat race by, leaving a blur of lemon-yellow, lavender, and gold. I am driving with Stella Stephanson, whom I affectionately refer to as my surrogate mum, along Highway 16 toward Leslie, SK, in search of the grave site of Gudrun Goodman. Gudrun Goodman1 was a midwife who practised from 1887 to 1922 in what is known as the Vatnabyggd (Lake Settlement) area in Saskatchewan. I first learned about Gudrun Goodman from A Harvest Yet To Reap.2 In the section on childbirth, the authors excerpt a passage from Walter Lindal's Saskatchewan Icelanders, in which he praises the contributions of Icelandic midwives to the early pioneer communities in Saskatchewan, but he singled out Gudrun Goodman: All the Icelandic midwives deserve special mention but one of them, Gudrun Goodman, had one experience, while still a young woman, which stands out as the finest example of courage and initiative in an emergency. A young woman was with child, expecting in about a week. She was pumping water for a team of oxen who were drinking out of a low trough. Both the oxen had long sharp [End Page 293] horns. One of them suddenly raised its head and one of the horns caught the woman in the side and ripped it open. Gudrun Goodman was immediately summoned. She saw that she could not save the woman but was determined to save the child. She administered an anesthetic, choloroform, operated and got the child while still alive. She brought it up – Gudbjorg Eyjolfson, who later became Mrs Thomas Halldorson, of Leslie, Saskatchewan.3 Lindal was right. Goodman does deserve special attention, since performing a Cesarean section at the turn of the twentieth century was a remarkable feat. That the baby lived was nothing short of a miracle; that Goodman raised the baby as her own was testament to extraordinary kindness and compassion. When I first encountered this story, I was struck by the tragedy of this unnamed woman...

Gossip in History

Comment résumer un discours bilingue sur le commérage? What a task! The author dares to suggest that what really goes on at the annual meetings of the CHA is gossip. Que les historiens préfèrent V appeler "le parler boutique" indique leur malaise devant le commérage. And yet gossip, rich in information, evaluation and entertainment is much more descriptive of what historians actually do at the CHA. In order to explain the uneasiness surrounding the word gossip the author traces the origin and changing meanings of the word gossip /commérage. In both French and English the word follows an identical etymological course through history and somewhere around the sixteenth century, the word acquires the modern sense of a chattery woman. The author links this new meaning of the word to a series of other changes, associated with the Scientific Revolution of the same period, the results of which were the subordination of women. Gossip became a language of powerlessness. But it is also a language special to women, revealing a rich oral culture. Without quite knowing it, historians use aspects of that culture in their own work for they are constantly analyzing the changing norms of any given society. The author illustrates the importance of gossip for premodern societies but argues that as many illustrations can be found for the twentieth century, even in Canada. She concludes by suggesting that gossip may be the historian's clue to deciphering what was really going on in Canadian history which, for ease of reference, she divides into three chatty parts. Une histoire du commérage pourrait tout révéler. . ..

Une Faute Sans Nom ☆

Lasthénie de Ferjol, heroine of the tale Une Histoire sans Nom written by Barbey d'Aurevilly, a young lady leading herself to death by self provoked hemorraghes, appears to be a paradigm of family problematic passed from one generation on to the next one through actings. We study here the link between self bleeding and severe anorexia nervosa, which is described in several case reports, noticing that both of these two symptoms are quite specific from the women. We can understand through this tale how a mother tangled up in a great driving violence and the destructivness coming with the fight against melancolic collapse can pass this violence on to her daughter in an underword way. Then the young girl repeats a story which is not hers, trying to get out of this destiny with actings: we see here how an unhealthy behaviour can be salutary, because of the differenciation it carries out. After all, Lasthénie de Ferjol syndrom seems to be very close to anorexia nervosa, the blood of provoked hemorraghes refering to the undernutrition provoked amenorrheae. The central problematic of these teenage girls' deseases would be the stakes and the risks of reaching womanhood, that is to say the acception of the passive position, which refers to the infans- mother relationship.

‘Martial Races’ and ‘Imperial Subjects’: Violence and Governance in Colonial India, 1857–1914

This essay explores the specificity of colonial violence in India. Although imperial and military historians are familiar with several instances of such violence—notably the rebellion in 1857 and the 1919 massacre at the Jallianwalla Bagh in Amritsar—there is a broader, and arguably more significant, history that has largely escaped attention. In contrast to metropolitan European states, where sovereignty derived, at least in principle, from a covenant between subjects and government, the sovereign power of the colonial state was always predicated on the violent subjugation of ‘the natives’. However, while violence was integral to colonialism, such violence was never a purely metropolitan agency: most of those recruited to serve in the colonial military were, themselves, Indian. Exploring the history of the imperial military in South Asia after 1857, the paper outlines the complex and rather ambiguous relationship between the colonial state and its ‘native armies’. résumé Cet article se penche sur la spécificité de la violence coloniale. Malgré des exemples familiers—comme la grande révolte de 1857 en Inde ou le massacre de Jallianwalla Bagh à Amritsar en 1919—il y a une histoire plus large et plus importante qui a échappée à l'attention des historiens. Contrairement aux états européens ou la souveraineté dérivait en principe du moins d'un contrat social entre les acteurs sociaux, le pouvoir souverain de l'état colonial restait fondé sur la subjugation violente des indigènes.

Retorica della diffrazione: Bembo, Aretino, Giulio Romano e Tasso. Letteratura e scena cortigiana by Fabio Finotti

864 Reviews sees it not so much as an exercise inmisogyny as an exercise in 'De tranquillitate animif. The volume ends with an appendix ('Pour une histoire de la famille et de l'amour a l'epoque de l'humanisme', pp. 28I-301, first published inRevue des etudes italiennes, 36 (I990), 89-I04) which points out that Alberti's first major work De familia does not appear in a vacuum, but belongs in that early humanist context that had produced Francesco Barbaro's De reuxoria ( 4 I5-I 6), Palmieri's Della vita civile, Bruni's Vita diDante, and Poggio'sAn seni sit uxor ducenda (allwritten in the 1430s, and all dealing with questions of marriage and the family). Despite a few misprints, the whole volume displays an analytic precision and varietas that would have pleased Alberti himself. What emerges most of all from it is the need to approach these difficult but rewarding texts and problems with a new critical awareness, and a variety of methodologies ranging from questions of sources and philological issues to analyses of literary structure and the history of reception. Furlan's critical acumen in these various fields is in clear evidence here and this bodes well for the future of Alberti studies, inwhich he plays amajor role. MAGDALENCOLLEGE, OXFORD MARTIN MCLAUGHLIN Retorica della diffrazione: Bembo, Aretino, Giulio Romano e Tasso. Letteratura e scena cortigiana. By FABIO FINOTTI. (Biblioteca di 'Lettere Italiane', Studi e testi, 63) Florence: Olschki. 2004. 466 pp.; 20 plates. E46. ISBN 88-222-53-84I. This very rich volume, which discusses aspects of courtly literature, drama, and the pastoral, with reference also to the visual arts, is the result of research partly presented at seminars and courses in Italy and the USA. The fact that much of the text had been discussed with postgraduates and colleagues has perhaps led the author to be confident that his title 'retorica della diffrazione' would pose no problems, and so he does not provide an introduction explaining his terminology and outlining his argument. Iwould have welcomed this, although, as one's reading progresses, the metaphorical use of the optical image of 'diffraction' is gradually clarified and the influences of past traditions together with their transformations in later works fall into place, thanks also to the author's ability to combine the general directions of cultural phenomena with a detailed reading of the texts under discussion. While in no sense an introductory study, and requiring in fact a sophisticated knowledge of Italian Renaissance culture and an appreciation of a wide range of critical works, both literary and artistic, this volume realistically acknowledges that some linguistic help isnecessary, so all quotations from Latin in the text are also given in Italian translation in the notes (but when Latin quotations appear in the notes they are left untranslated), and the very useful appendix with a relevant selection from Bembo's Carmina is accompanied by Finotti's own elegant Italian rendering. The study is divided into three sections. The first is devoted to 'The lyric scene: Pietro Bembo', and consists of two chapters, one treating the combination of 'elo quence/rhetoric' and 'experience' inBembo's De Aetna and Asolani and the fusion of philology and linguistics which he had inherited from Poliziano and from which he progressed in the direction of Landino, the other taking us squarely into the theme of the volume, 'Rhetoric and diffraction in the Asolani'. Here the features of De Aetna which gave rhetoric a central place and linked it to experience are confirmed, but the argument ismoved from a philosophical plane to amore literary one. The theatrical element, to be further developed in the context of drama and the pastoral, is already highlighted in the analysis of this courtly dialogue, which is considered in its various editions. MLR, I0I.3, 2oo6 865 The second section is entitled 'The comic scene: Pietro Aretino' and is devoted toAretino's play IIMarescalco and its relationship to Castiglione's Cortegiano. The argument isdeveloped particularly in relation to the structure of the two texts and their common use of the burla, which, unlike its functional exploitation inMachiavelli's Mandragola, represents a taste for 'second-degree' comedy, i.e. comedy...

Foundations of a Visual Music

Foundations of a Visual Music

A history of diabetes mellitus or how a disease of the kidneys evolved into a kidney disease

Diabetes mellitus has a long history during which it was considered to be a disease of the kidneys well into the middle of the 19th century. Recognized in antiquity from its excessive urine output and described as a disease of the urinary tract, its clinical features and fatal outcome were quite accurately recorded by the 1st century ad . Galen (129-200) described it as a disease specific to the kidneys because of a weakness in their retentive faculties. The sweet taste of diabetic urine, which is described in ancient Indian texts and noted by Avicenna (980-1037) and Morgagni (1635-1683), was attributed to the passage of absorbed water and nutrients unchanged into the urine. In 1674, Thomas Willis (1621-1675) first differentiated diabetes from other causes of polyuria by the sweet taste (quasi melle) of diabetic urine and suggested that the sweetness first appears in the blood. A century later, Matthew Dobson (1732-1784) showed that the urine sweetness was because of sugar and was preceded and accompanied by sugar in the blood. Although diabetes then came to be ascribed to increased sugar in the blood, the presence of sugar in the urine continued to be attributed to the decreased retentive properties of the kidneys. The experimental production of diabetes in pancreatectomized dogs that could be reversed by subcutaneous pancreatic transplantation in 1889, and ultimate isolation of insulin in 1922 clearly established diabetes as an endocrine disease. The stage of diabetes as a disease of the kidneys was now over but that of diabetes as a cause of kidney disease was yet to come. Diabetes as a cause of end stage kidney disease was first described in 1936 and extensively documented shortly thereafter, whereas the evidence of its increasing prevalence as a cause of chronic kidney disease continues to accrue.

La médicalisation de la sexualité. Foucault et Lantéri-Laura : un débat qui n'a pas eu lieu

Lanteri Laura's book : Reading perversion : a history of its medical appropriation (Lecture des perversions : une histoire de leur appropriation médicale) was published in 1979, three years after Michel Foucault's first volume of The History of Sexuality. These two books deal with the history of sexuality in the XIX° century, yet strangely Lanteri Laura does not cite Foucault. A close reading of both texts demonstrates two points. (1) While Foucault was mainly concerned with the relationship between sexuality and truth, power and knowledge, Lantéri-Laura worked more specifically on sexual perversions and the way in which psychiatry redefined them by withdrawing them from the fields of religion and law. (2) Moreover, Foucault did not undertake a critical analysis of psychoanalysis. Instead, he used the psychoanalytic model to construct the model of of the “apparatus of sexuality” based on language. For his part, Lanteri Laura provided evidence of the limited withdrawal of Freud reagrading the sexological categories of his time and a return within lacanian psychoanalysis to categories that were anchored in the dominant social morality of the time. Finally, whereas Lantéri-Laura attempted to objectify psychoanalysis and to place it within a historical and ideological perspective, Foucault was in the end actively inspired by the psychoanalytical model and used it in the social and historical construction of sexuality.

Quelques spectres et revenants dans un poème de Seamus Heaney

D’abord ce poeme de Seamus Heaney, puis une histoire de bus : Two LorriesIt’s raining on black coal and warm wet ashes.There are tyre-marks in the yard, Agnew’s old lorryHas its cribs down and Agnew the coalmanWith his Belfast accent’s sweet-talking my mother.Would she ever go to a film in Magherafelt?But it’s raining and he still has half the load To deliver farther on. This time the lodeOur coal came from was silk-black, so the ashesWill be the silkiest white. The Magherafelt(Via Toomebridg...

The disposition of things: spontaneous order in the Esprit des Lois1

The disposition of things: spontaneous order in the Esprit des Lois1

Emergence of the concept of endocrine function and endocrinology

Emergence of the concept of endocrine function and endocrinology

Obésité à l'adolescence. Une histoire d'enfance…

Obésité à l'adolescence. Une histoire d'enfance…

Pierre Goldman and the Beginnings of jeune litterature juive

Very few Jewish writers of the twentieth century have enjoyed a reception comparable to that of the political activist, self-styled guerrilla, gangster, and author Pierre Goldman. In 1979, the assassination of the thirty-five year old Goldman by members of a right-wing commando provoked an outcry from the general public and prompted a reevaluation of the dangers of anti-Semitism among French Jews. The Marxist critic Regis Debray and the Jewish writer Helene Cixous responded to Goldman's slaying by devoting entire books to the question of how his life and death came to challenge the very foundation of the grande nation. The novelist Catherine Axelrad suggested in her novel La Varsovienne (1990) that the circumstances of Goldman's murder--his killers had never been found and remained at large--enabled the extreme Left to offer quasi-national funerals for the revolution. More than 15,000 people attended his funeral, among them Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Samuel Beckett, Yves Montand, and many of the Jewish student leaders who never had gained Goldman's support. (1) For many of his peers, the killing of the Jewish enfant terrible brought the issue of their own status and safety as outspoken Jews to the forefront. The journalist Luc Rosenzweig--a colleague of Goldman at Liberation--took the event as incentive to conduct a series of interviews with young Jews, which he later published as La France juive, a title sardonically alluding to Edouard Drumont's notorious anti-Semite pamphlet La France from 1886. According to Rosenzweig, the hors-la-loi Goldman became a martyr for those who, facing the choice between Judaism (particularism) and the University (universalism), chose the latter. (2) Rosenzweig's collection of interviews came to stand as powerful homage to Goldman, not as a political extremist, but as a persecuted Jew whose death told the story of France's inability to render justice to its Jewish citizens. In his preface, Rosenzweig, the son of German communists, wrote: En tuant Pierre Goldman, ses assassins, quels qu'ils soient, ont tente de mettre un terme definitif a une histoire que la France traine comme un boulet: celle de la lachete collective d'un peuple qui accepte d'envoyer 'ses' juifs a la mort. (3) In the first survey of the emerging jeune litterature juive presented in 1982, the literary critic Lazare Bitoun explained the impact of Goldman's life and memoirs by pointing to Goldman's rejection of the discourse of victimization. Instead of using the israelite et sa connotation aigre-douce de la langue francaise, Goldman had had the courage to replace it le mot Juif qui revendique et affirme une difference. (4) The opening line from his autobiography Souvenirs obscurs d'un Juif polonais ne en France (published in 1975), which contained in condensed form his historical, generational, and biographical point of departure, was canonized by his peers and the authors following him: suis ne le 22 juin 1944 a Lyon, en France, en France occupee par les nazis (longtemps j'ai pense que j'etais ne et mort le 22 juin 1944).... Je n'avais pas l'age de combattre, mais, a peine en vie, j'eus l'age de pouvoir perir dans les crematoires de Pologne (27). It is this line that Henry Raczymow uses almost ten years later as an epigraph to his novel Un cri sans voix, in which he describes the lethal fate suffered decades after the Shoah by a young Jewish woman whose identification with the resistance fighters from the Warsaw ghetto ultimately leads her to commit suicide in 1982. Another Jewish writer of Goldman's generation, Myriam Anissimov, dedicated one of her books to Goldman. Even authors of Sephardic background, such as the Algerian-born Jean-Luc Allouche, turned to Goldman as a Jew who --because he could never be assimilated--embodied the absolute stranger, the lueur d'une derniere fraternite desesperee. (5) Allouche had remembered in his autobiography how he, a Maghrebi-born Jew, had felt quite vexed by a slogan celebrating solidarity with the student leader Danny Cohn-Bendit during the student protests: . …

Pour une histoire critique de la philosophie: choix d'articles philosophiques du 'Dictionnaire historique et critique' by Pierre Bayle , Jean-Michel Gros , Jacques Chomarat (review)

MLRy 98.1, 2003 199 impressive array of erudition, but likely to be of more interest to the specialist in psychoanalytical and structural criticism than to the general student of Moliere. University of Leeds David Shaw Pour une histoire critique de la philosophie: choix d'articles philosophiques du 'Dictionnaire historique et critique'. By Pierre Bayle. Ed. by Jean-Michel Gros with the collaboration of Jacques Chomarat. (Vie des Huguenots, ed. by Antony McKenna, 16) Paris: Champion. 2001. 824 pp. 160 SwF; 760 F; ?115.86. ISBN 2-7453-0422-4. In volume 13 of this series Antony McKenna presented a general selection of ar? ticles from the Dictionnaire historique et critique, and here Jean-Michel Gros (well known forhis critical edition ofthe Commentaire philosophique (Paris: Presses Pocket, 1992)) concentrates specifically on the philosophical articles, estimated by Elisabeth Labrousse toconstitute 5 per cent ofthe Dictionnaire. In his introduction Gros revisits Bayle's biography, stressing three aspects: heterodoxy, the teaching ofphilosophy, and journalism. He reminds us of the impact the Dictionnaire had when it firstappeared in 1696 and remarks that, when reading it, one in a sense has to 'reapprendre a lire', such are the complexities of the interplay between the main text and the footnotes. Although not reproduced here for practical reasons, this very particular typography, where footnotes and subfootnotes often dominated the page and indeed forlater read? ers sometimes became more interesting than the main body of the article, is shown to be integral to Bayle's approach, making any purely linear reading impossible. The articles chosen are those considered to be the most significant (Manicheens, Pyrrhon, Rorarius, and Spinoza, for example), and cover issues such as scepticism, the virtuous atheist, and evil; each is preceded by a very useful introduction which explains points which may now be obscure, and very helpfully all quotations in Latin and Greek have been translated. The articles are complemented by the inclusion of Bayle's Preface to the firstedition and his 'Eclaircissements', which the Rotterdam Consistory required him to add to the second edition of 1702. Gros acknowledges that a selection of articles is necessarily unsatisfactory for a variety of reasons, not least because one of the strengths and interests of Bayle's writing is that philosophy permeated even those articles which appeared far removed from philosophical topics. His skill was precisely in being capable of slipping philosophical considerations into the most unlikely places, an approach which was to be much pursued by his successors, and this aspect is necessarily lost here. While a selection can therefore never really give a precise idea of what Bayle himself called 'cette mer orageuse et sans fond', Gros's edition does provide a very clear presentation of some of the articles which proved es? pecially important when the Dictionnaire firstappeared and whose impact continued on into the eighteenth century. The background information provided assists under? standing and appreciation immensely and this new edition thus constitutes another extremely useful contribution to the task of partially re-editing the writings of Bayle. University of Strathclyde Joy Charnley Correspondance de Pierre Bayle. Ed. by Elisabeth Labrousse and others. Vol. n: Novembre i6j4-novembre i6yy: lettres 66-146. Oxford: Voltaire Foundation. 2001. xx + 529 pp. ISBN 0-7294-0731-4. This, the second of twelve volumes of correspondence planned (see MLR 98 (2001), 500-01, forVolume 1), is dedicated to Elisabeth Labrousse, who continued to work on ...

L’Écrivain éditeur , Vol. I: Du Moyen Age à la fin du XVIIIe siècle ed. by François Bessire (review)

210 Reviews adapted her own fictions for the stage, without making genre-related changes to the text, and seemed unconcerned with the 'scenicity' of theatre. In the final chapters these contrasting attitudes to genre are convincingly related to Duras's theme of love as 'fusion avec l'autre' (p. 28), as opposed to Beckett's central theme ofthe search for Self, a self of which the Other marks the limits. Of course this theme has been the fo? cus of intense controversy, and Engelberts's vigorous challenge to the postmodernist critics, who find in Beckett a Derridean deconstruction of the Self, is an original con? tribution. He concludes that as the author pushes at the limits of theatre, he defines an irreducible essence of theatre, and similarly he is able to 'aller a la limite du moi et faire de la sorte l'experience la plus radicale du moi' (p. 364). So, not always easy reading, but well worth the effortfor the subtlety and range of its argument, based on very detailed textual analysis. Overall an ambitious and thoughtful study. University of Leeds John Rothenberg L'Ecrivain editeur, Vol. i: Du Moyen Age a lafin du XVIIIe siecle. Ed. by Franc;ois Bessire. (Travaux de Litterature publies par l'Adirel, 14) Geneva: Droz. 2001. 402 pp. 94.21 SwF; ?61.40. ISBN 2-9507341-9-7. Readers familiar with the Association pour la Diffusion de la Recherche Litteraire will know that this admirable series of publications (one per year) engages with wideranging themes that only a collaborative approach can properly address. Two volumes (of which this is the first)will explore the topic of authors as editors (either of their own or of someone else's works), with the aim of offering 'une histoire de la maitrise de I*ecrivain sur le livre, une histoire de l'ecriture du livre' (p. 8). What this amounts to in practice is an examination of the author's attempts to control the transmission, reception, and survival of his or her own work, and (for the period after the invention of printing) the complex relationship between authors, printers, and booksellers, censorship, and the changing legislationon copyright. Preceded by a good, contextual? izing overview by Francois Bessire, twenty-one studies are presented in chronological order. There are three essays on the medieval period: Monique Leonard on the dit; Patricia Michon on Deschamps's Double lay de la fragilite humaine; Gerard Gros on Martin le Franc as a reader of Charles d'Orleans. The omission of Christine de Pizan from this section, touched upon at p. 8 n. 6, is particularly regrettable, given that she was also omitted from Travaux de Litterature, Vol. 11, on the literary manu? script. Since it is now established that over fifty autograph manuscripts have survived, these would have provided a unique corpus of material for study. Six further essays concern the Renaissance (Adrian Armstrong on the Grands Rhetoriqueurs; Gerard Defaux on Marot, Rabelais, and Dolet; Florian Presig on Clement Marot as editor of his father,Jean; Louis Lobbes on Erasmus as editor of Plutarch; Nicole Cazauran on Boaistuau and Gruget as editors of the Heptameron; Jean-Claude Arnould on Marie de Gournay); six on the seventeenth century (Guido Saba on Georges de Scudery and Jean Mairet as editors of Theophile de Viau; Bernard Barbiche on Sully's (Economies royales; Denis Donetzkoff on Robert Arnauld d'Andilly as editor of the letters of Jean Duvergier de Hauranne, abbe de Saint-Cyran; Alain Niderst on Madeleine de Scudery, Menage, and Pellisson as editors of Sarasin; Jean Lafond on La Rochefoucauld; Myriam Maitre on strategies adopted by women writers); six on the eighteenth century (Frederic Deloffre on Robert Challe; Laurent Versini on Diderot; Roger Marchal on Diderot and Salomon Gessner; Marie-Emmanuelle Plagnol on Carmontelle; Veronique Sarrazin on legal and economic aspects; Patricia Gray and Wallace Kirsop on the prospectus, the author, and his public). From this wealth of material, one could perhaps single out for special mention Presig's fascinating exploration of Clement Marot's activities as editor of his father's works (it is shown that MLR, 98.1, 2003 211 these activities have as much to do with Clement's...

Correspondance de Pierre Bayle. Vol. II: Novembre 1674-novembre 1677: lettres 66-146 by Elisabeth Labrousse (review)

MLRy 98.1, 2003 199 impressive array of erudition, but likely to be of more interest to the specialist in psychoanalytical and structural criticism than to the general student of Moliere. University of Leeds David Shaw Pour une histoire critique de la philosophie: choix d'articles philosophiques du 'Dictionnaire historique et critique'. By Pierre Bayle. Ed. by Jean-Michel Gros with the collaboration of Jacques Chomarat. (Vie des Huguenots, ed. by Antony McKenna, 16) Paris: Champion. 2001. 824 pp. 160 SwF; 760 F; ?115.86. ISBN 2-7453-0422-4. In volume 13 of this series Antony McKenna presented a general selection of ar? ticles from the Dictionnaire historique et critique, and here Jean-Michel Gros (well known forhis critical edition ofthe Commentaire philosophique (Paris: Presses Pocket, 1992)) concentrates specifically on the philosophical articles, estimated by Elisabeth Labrousse toconstitute 5 per cent ofthe Dictionnaire. In his introduction Gros revisits Bayle's biography, stressing three aspects: heterodoxy, the teaching ofphilosophy, and journalism. He reminds us of the impact the Dictionnaire had when it firstappeared in 1696 and remarks that, when reading it, one in a sense has to 'reapprendre a lire', such are the complexities of the interplay between the main text and the footnotes. Although not reproduced here for practical reasons, this very particular typography, where footnotes and subfootnotes often dominated the page and indeed forlater read? ers sometimes became more interesting than the main body of the article, is shown to be integral to Bayle's approach, making any purely linear reading impossible. The articles chosen are those considered to be the most significant (Manicheens, Pyrrhon, Rorarius, and Spinoza, for example), and cover issues such as scepticism, the virtuous atheist, and evil; each is preceded by a very useful introduction which explains points which may now be obscure, and very helpfully all quotations in Latin and Greek have been translated. The articles are complemented by the inclusion of Bayle's Preface to the firstedition and his 'Eclaircissements', which the Rotterdam Consistory required him to add to the second edition of 1702. Gros acknowledges that a selection of articles is necessarily unsatisfactory for a variety of reasons, not least because one of the strengths and interests of Bayle's writing is that philosophy permeated even those articles which appeared far removed from philosophical topics. His skill was precisely in being capable of slipping philosophical considerations into the most unlikely places, an approach which was to be much pursued by his successors, and this aspect is necessarily lost here. While a selection can therefore never really give a precise idea of what Bayle himself called 'cette mer orageuse et sans fond', Gros's edition does provide a very clear presentation of some of the articles which proved es? pecially important when the Dictionnaire firstappeared and whose impact continued on into the eighteenth century. The background information provided assists under? standing and appreciation immensely and this new edition thus constitutes another extremely useful contribution to the task of partially re-editing the writings of Bayle. University of Strathclyde Joy Charnley Correspondance de Pierre Bayle. Ed. by Elisabeth Labrousse and others. Vol. n: Novembre i6j4-novembre i6yy: lettres 66-146. Oxford: Voltaire Foundation. 2001. xx + 529 pp. ISBN 0-7294-0731-4. This, the second of twelve volumes of correspondence planned (see MLR 98 (2001), 500-01, forVolume 1), is dedicated to Elisabeth Labrousse, who continued to work on 200 Reviews it up until a month before her death in February 2000. This volume contains eighty letters, written during the years which Bayle spent in Rouen, Paris, and then Sedan, where he had found a teaching post at the Academie. As in Volume 1,the vast majority of the letters are to members of his family (his parents, brothers, and cousins), with a slightly smaller number addressed to friends he had made during his years in Geneva (Basnage, Minutoli, Tronchin). Very personal letters (e.g. letter 87 to his mother) sit alongside discussions of his recent reading (letter 105 to his brother Jacob) and long exchanges of ideas (letter 89 to Minutoli). However, as Antony McKenna points out in the introduction, it is clear from references in the remaining letters that many others...

Savoir et économie dans l’œuvre de Molière by Richard Sörman (review)

198 Reviews imperii and translatio studii, its connection with the centralizing tendencies of the Valois monarchy and with the Plei'ade's anxious overtures to Henri II. This new edition, moreover, is supplemented by dossiers critiques which include the major contributions to the literary quarrel surrounding the manifesto, not just Aneau's Quintilhoratian, but also the offeringsof Sebillet and Guillaume Des Autelz, together with Du Bellay's own preface to the second edition of the Olive. The whole of Speroni's Dialogo delle lingue is also included, together with Gruget's French translation, allowing the reader to see how Du Bellay adapted his most important contemporary source (although a better balance might have been achieved by a more selective presentation of just those parts of the Dialogo which Du Bellay imitated). Monferran's edition undoubtedly provides us with the most up-to-date and complete version of Du Bellay's seminal work, in all its richness and complexity. University of Aberdeen David Hartley Savoir et economie dans I'oeuvre de Moliere. By Richard Sorman. (Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis, Studia Romanica Upsaliensia, 62) Uppsala: Uppsala University Library. 2001. 196 pp. ISBN 91-554-4978-6. Richard Sorman's learned volume studies the psychology of Moliere's characters from a structuralist perspective. He argues that they feel they lack 'completeness' (completude) and attempt to rectifythis by seeking a form of absolute knowledge. The search is inevitably fruitless. Argan and Jourdain believe blindly in the reality of such knowledge and base their lives on this belief to the extent of jeopardizing their freedom and sanity. Agnes symbolizes for Arnolphe the illusory possibility of knowing everything about her. Alceste and Philaminte feel that they have actually achieved perfect 'completeness' and Don Juan allegedly triumphs in provoking the intervention of an entity representing ultimate knowledge. What these egocentric characters lack, argues Sorman, is an appreciation that society depends on reciprocating mechanisms (economies) such as generosity, commitment, honouring debts, and awareness of the qualities of others. This study, accessibly presented, contains stimulating analyses of the characters' tendency to shun uncertainty, their claims to be unique, the relationship between bluestocking and pere-obstacle, the hopelessness of striving consciously to acquire refinement , and the ambiguous nature of expertise. The author announces the structuralist perspective at the start and repeatedly stresses that this is a 'reading' of Moliere, rather than an analysis of how the plays work in the theatre. So he cannot be accused of misleading the reader over his approach. But one sometimes feels that the plays are adapted to fitthe theory, rather than the reverse. If Jourdain's pathetic respect forexperts tells us much about his social inferiority,Argan's relationship with doctors owes much to the tradition ofthe comic pedant, which Sorman barely mentions. Moreover, the author's claim that Hous les savants sont pour Moliere des imposteurs' (p. 37, em? phasis added) is simply not true. Many of his doctors are comic precisely because they genuinely believe in the efficacyof their art, and the tutors hired by Jourdain all seem competent in their field. Also, the idea of Don Juan triumphing by provoking the intervention ofthe 'savoir absolu' ('Dom Juan reussit la ou tous les autres echouent' (p. 116)) seems particularly odd: the intervention of the Statue self-evidently brings about the defeat of Don Juan and is anyway an indispensable part of the myth, not something invented by Moliere. In addition, the work contains, forthis reader at least, too many references to authorities such as Rey-Flaud, Lacan, and Levi-Strauss, many of which lead into rambling philosophical digressions telling us more about Sorman's intellectual interests than about Moliere. A thought-provoking work based on an MLRy 98.1, 2003 199 impressive array of erudition, but likely to be of more interest to the specialist in psychoanalytical and structural criticism than to the general student of Moliere. University of Leeds David Shaw Pour une histoire critique de la philosophie: choix d'articles philosophiques du 'Dictionnaire historique et critique'. By Pierre Bayle. Ed. by Jean-Michel Gros with the collaboration of Jacques Chomarat. (Vie des Huguenots, ed. by Antony McKenna, 16) Paris: Champion. 2001. 824 pp. 160 SwF; 760 F; ?115.86. ISBN 2...