Flaminio de Birague: Édition critique par Roland Guillot et Michel Clément. Tome ii. (Textes littéraires français, 557). Geneva, Droz, 2003. xcii + 256 pp. This second volume, in a projected series of three, of the works of a poet whose biography remains almost entirely unknown (except that he was the second cousin of the famous René, cardinal and chancellor of France under Charles IX and Henri III) gives the Élegies (six in number, ranging from forty-four to 110 verses in length), Orbecche poeme tragique (comprising 568 alexandrins), and the Secondes amours (made up of thirty-two pieces: twenty-three sonnets plus a number of chansons, odes, stances, and so on). This rather slim selection is supplemented by a long introduction and abundant notes, with some repetition between the two. The former examines thoroughly the elegy as a (notoriously diffuse) genre and as practised by Birague, as well as the narrative poem, adapted from a novella and play by Giraldi Cinthio. Nothing is said of the Secondes amours, though the introduction to the first volume, which gave the Premieres amours, discussed the establishment of these two sections in the third, 1585, edition. The editors also offer detailed structural analyses of the various pieces and exhaustive references signalling the sources and other contemporary examples of many themes and images. The love poetry is, for the most part, of a fairly conventional neo-Petrarchan ilk. More interesting is Orbecche, both because it stands at the cross-roads of several genres (the epic narrative, oriental tale, ‘histoire tragique’ and ‘nouvelle’) and by reason of its dedication to Marguerite de Valois. First published in 1583, the poet seems to his editors anxious in 1585 to distance the king's sister from the intrigue recounted, perhaps as a result of unfortunate comparisons between the dedicatee and the heroine: the latter embraces her murdered spouse's head; Marguerite was rumoured to have recuperated and interred that of her executed lover La Molle. The most amusing piece is found in the appendix, L'Enfer de la mere Cardine, traictant de la cruelle et terrible bataille qui fut aux enfers, entre les diables et les maquerelles de Paris. Here the reader is on his own, however, with no discussion of the authenticity of the work's attribution to Birague or of its possible relation to the rest of his corpus, no notes, no glossary, and no intervention to help with difficult punctuation or spelling (‘long’=l'on, for instance). While the edition is generally carefully prepared, there are a number of typos, occasionally in the presentation of the poetry itself, and one probable misreading: ‘j'iray si hautement/Que les Dieux m’ennuiront remplis d'estonnement' should surely be ‘ennviront’ (p. 49). The notes, while copious, leave certain elements unelucidated, and the day on which many requiems are said for the dead is All Souls not Good Friday, despite the latter's Petrarchan credentials (p. 142). The absence of page numbers in many references in the introduction, even for quotations, is regrettable; the inclusion in the index of proper nouns of ‘Nef’, ‘Navire’, ‘Perle’, ‘Regne’, and the like, presumably because they figure with initial capitals, is perplexing. Thus, while considerable erudition is displayed, one could wish for an edition at once somewhat less wieldy and more ‘user-friendly’.