1592-1992: recent French works on the Renaissance.

On this side of the Atlantic, 1992 marked the 500th anniversary of Columbus' voyage; in French academic circles, however, it was noted more for the 400th anniversary of Montaigne's death. A few adventuresome scholars actually tried to combine the two, with mixed results. In Ilana Zinguer's edition of the proceed-kings f an international conference on Montaigne, Le lecteur, l'auteur et l'ecrivain: Montaigne, 1492-1592-1992 (Paris: Champion, 1993), the theme of the New World receives short shrift. It is subsumed under the amorphous heading of "Montaigne and the Other," a topic so broad that it permitted such scholars as Eva Kushner, Claude-Gilbert Dubols, and Francois Rigolot to discuss (respectively) the author as other, Montaigne and the supernatural, and Montaigne's interpretation of La Boetie's Servitude volontaire--topics far removed from the ostensible theme of the New World. Olivier Pot, however, manages with much greater success to commemorate both anniversaries in his L'inqueitante etrangete: Montaigne: la pierre, le cannibale, la melancholie (Paris: Champion, 1993), an ingenious work that ranges over a wide array of seemingly disparate topics.

Pot begins by giving serious consideration to Montaigne's assertion, in the essay "De l'affection des peres aux enfans," that it was a "melancholy humor" that first "put in his head" the idea of writing about himself. In a fascinating analysis of Aristotelian psychology and Renaissance humor theory, Pot demonstrates how this and other such statements about "melancholy" provide an entree into Montaigne's conception of the actual process of artistic creation, an erotic or generative process governed by the melancholic humor. By contrasting "melancholy" with "sadness," Pot reveals how Montaigne gradually came to regard the former as a creative humor, one that could be rendered ineffectual by sadness. In Pot's interpretation, the Essais represent a therapeutic journey in which sadness--depicted in Montaigne's first composition, "De la tristesse"--is ]transmuted into creative melancholy via the diversion of writing, a diversion that increasingly gives substance to the humor.

In three complex and wide ranging chapters, Pot elicits the theme of melancholy from the Essais. First, he shows how Montaigne progressively reinterprets Aristotelian psychology in order to make room for a notion of "good" or creative melancholy, which he comes to see as his defining humor, as opposed to the "bad" melancholy that leads toward madness. Then, in a circuitous chapter beginning with a brilliant discussion of the parallels between "Des cannibales" and La Boetie's Servitude volontaire, Pot draws an analogy between melancholy as a "devouring" humor (i58) and cannibalism. Just as there are "good" and "bad" forms of melancholy for Montaigne, so too there are "good" and "bad" forms of cannibalism. In the former, the devouring of human flesh is a symbolic act constitutive of culture; whereas in the latter, it is an indiscriminate act destructive of culture. Thus, according to Pot, the cannibals of Brazil provide Montaigne with a many faceted metaphor, not only for the melancholy that is constitutive of the self in the Essais, but also for the "natural" basis of "culture" in his (and La Boetie's) secular view of society. Pot elaborates on this last theme in his final chapter, on Montaigne's trip to Italy in search of a cure for his kidney stones. Here travel becomes Montaigne's metaphor for the mobility of spirit characteristic of creative melancholy, which freely and naturally adapts itself to the world. According to Pot, Montaigne elaborates on the free and natural quality of "the culture of melancholy" in "Des coches," which deals with the peoples of the New World.

Pot's is an intriguing reading of the Essais that brings a great deal of material together under the rubric of "melancholy." Although (as a historian) I sometimes thought that he was a bit too free with the textual associations necessary to sustain his theme, I always found his insights stimulating--especially in his pathbreaking analysis of "Des cannibales," which is so rich that it bursts the thematic framework of the book. The very breadth of his interests, however, enables Pot to do justice to our two anniversaries, exploring with striking originality not only the theme of melancholy in the Essais but also that of the New World.

Among the crop of monographs on Montaigne appearing around the commemorative year Of 1992, several others are especially worthy of note. In his Les commerces de Montaigne: le discours economique des |Essais' (Paris: Nizet, 1992), Philippe Desan ostensibly sets out to show how a new "economic discourse" arising in the sixteenth century manifested itself in Montaigne's thought. In reality, his aim is much more ambitious, for he reinterprets the Essais as the battleground between a declining noble "ideology" and an emergent bourgeois one--a contest that results in the "deconstruction of authority," yielding a new mode of discourse (18). He attributes the emergence of the "economic discourse" to the price rise of the sixteenth century, which generated a spate of popular treatises that helped introduce economic images and metaphors into French literature. These motifs are apparent in the writings of such figures as Rabelais and Ronsard; but, according to Desan, it is only with Montaigne that they constitute a genuine form of discourse, signaling the emergence of a "mode de pensee essentiellement marchand dont la logique est principalement echangiste et commerciale" (13).

Desan grounds his interpretation of Montaigne's "economic discourse in an analysis of the social history of the period, which he epitomizes in terms of the rise of merchant capitalism and the decline of the traditional nobility (26). This argument--which was advanced most eloquently in Lucien Romier's Le royaume de Catherine de Medici (1922)--provides the basis for Desan's contention that the struggle between ideologies would yield a new mode of discourse. Unfortunately, though, the thrust of recent social history has called this argument into question by revealing the continued power and prosperity of the nobility in early modern France (see, for example, James B. Wood's The Nobility of the |Election' of Bayeux [1980]). Of course, the nobility confronted new challenges --as Desan correctly points out--but one can no longer assert with confidence that it was "declining" in the face of an "emerging" bourgeoisle.

This criticism notwithstanding, Desan's analysis of the economic images and metaphors in the Essai Montaigne's linguistic habits. Through an examination of terms like commerce, trafique, profit, emprunt, and registre, Desan argues for the pervasiveness of the new "economic discourse." I sometimes found his arguments a bit forced, as for example in his etymological analysis of the term commerce, which began to be applied to social relations in the mid sixteenth century (112). Desan notes in passing that Seneca and Tacitus used the term commercium in this sense, although he nonetheless maintains that Montaigne's use of the French equivalent reflects the influence of the emerging "economic discourse." Might it just as easily reflect the stylistic influence of two of Montaigne's favorite authors (authors, I might add, who were very much in vogue by mid-century)?

Desan's work deserves to be read in conjunction with David Lewis Schaefer's The Political Philosophy of Montaigne (1990), which interprets Montaigne as a precursor of modern liberalism. Whereas Schaefer makes the philosophical case for this interpretation, Desan can be regarded as making the linguistic case. I am not sympathetic to this interpretation, which (among other things) seems to foster an anachronistic reading of the text. But one might respond by claiming that Desan situates this reading in the context of Montaigne's own linguistic habits. In any case, this new interpretation clearly seems to be gaining adherents and merits further consideration by Montaigne scholars.

The content of Arnaud Tripet's Montaigne et l'art du prologue au XVIe siecle (Paris: Champion, 1992) belies its modest title. Through a study of the prologue in Renaissance literature--including not only Montaigne but also Boccaccio, Cervantes, Du Bellay, Rabelais, Ronsard, Sceve, and a host of other figures--Tripet offers a series of profound reflections upon the identity, and the culture of the book. Indeed, Tripet's book has changed the way I look at books.

Tripet argues that the Renaissance marks the flowering of the prologue after centuries of authorial anonymity, as the book emerges as a more self-conscious product (v). This assertion seems to give short shrift to the medieval prologue, but there can be no denying the seminal importance of printing and of classical rhetoric in changing the author's conception of his activity and its result. Through a variety of metaphors and associations, Tripet eloquently describes the prologue as the gateway to the text, as the bridge between author and reader, where the author reveals himself and his intentions in an attempt to encourage further reading. As a bridge, the prologue occupies an ambiguous position in the text, comprising a narrow passage between author and reader bounded by a host of conventions and expectations. Printing has rendered this the realm of the "paratext," including both front and back matter; Tripet pays special attention to the resonance between the prologue and such traditional front matter as the title, subtitle, dedication, and engraved emblem.

In the long, central chapter of the book - appropriately subtitled, "Une aventure taxinomique"--Tripet distinguishes between prologues that are "exterior" to the text and those that are "integral" to the text. The former are traditionally "frontal," establishing a dialogue between text and paratext, between author and reader. Tripet further distinguishes between exterior prologues that tend to be "occasional" (generally concerning matters pertaining to the publication of the book) and those that tend to be "autonomous" (free standing pieces existing in tension with the text)--the latter are Tripet's real meat, and he dissects them through analyses of prologues by Du Bellay, Calvin, and Rabelais. He then moves on to consider the "integral" prologue in great detail, from its origins in the first line of the Iliad ("Sing, O godess, the anger of Peleus' son Achilleus . . ."), to its role in ancient philosophy, its manifestations in ancient and Renaissance theater, and its function in the Renaissance "novel." Tripet reserves the next chapter entirely for a consideration of the prologue in poetry, with special emphasis on Petrarch.

Tripet's extensive treatment of "integral" and poetic prologues serves to extend the meaning of the term to encompass any self-conscious dialogue between author and reader, or dialectic between author and text, regardless of where it appears. This definition sets the stage for Tripet's consideration of the Essais in his concluding chapter. He begins by analyzing Montaigne's paradoxical "Au lecteur," which--making full use of tropes about honesty and modesty--invites the reader to close the book. Tripet then moves on to consider the many "prologal" moments in a text that repeatedly stops and starts, that repeatedly invites the reader's reentry. Tripet's consideration of the prologue--a device rendered innocuous for us by our prolonged immersion in the culture of the book--thus provides a critical lever for understanding a text balanced at the cusp between author and reader.

What Tripet has done for the text of the Essais--revealing the resonances between author and reader--Marcel Tetel does for the intertext. In Presences italiennes dans les |Essais' de Montaigne (Paris: Champion, 1992), Tetel reveals the resonances between the Essais and the Italian Renaissance works from which Montaigne borrowed, resonances whose reverberations are apparent not only in what Montaigne chose to engage with in Italian culture but also in what he chose to ignore. The intertext thus reveals for Tetel dialogues--spoken and unspoken--that help us reconstitute the "semantic plentitude" of Renaissance humanism (3). Not content with so ambitious an undertaking, Tetel goes even further, to explore the resonances between Montaigne's textual interchange with the Italians and his actual interchange with them during his trip to Italy. Much like Tripet's work, then, Tetel's belies its modest title.

The relative paucity of Montaigne's borrowings from Italian authors casts those borrowings in high relief, enabling Tetel to pick up the echoes of intertextual resonances. For example, his chapter on borrowings from Petrarch begins with the consideration of a line from the Sonnets, which Montaigne used in the essay "De la tristesse" to illustrate the overwhelming power of emotions. From this innocuous borrowing, Tetel proceeds to establish an affinity between Montaigne's concern with sadness and the tendency toward depression to which Petrarch confesses in the Secretum, an affinity that Montaigne addresses obliquely in an attempt to define the uniqueness of his own personality. Tetel reveals the Petrarchian context, not only for Montaigne's treatment of the subject of sadness, but also for his treatment of the all important themes of irresolution and solitude--themes punctuated by strategically placed borrowings from the Italian poet. Tetel's coverage of other figures--Castiglione, Machiavelli, Guicciardini, Ariosto, and Tasso--firmly establishes the Italian context for Montaigne's humanism, which was characterized by a subtle and selective dialogue with these authors. Montaigne's borrowings from the Italians thus represent (in Tetel's metaphor) the tip of a cultural iceberg (143-44).

The second part of the book concerns the play of intertextuality surrounding the Journal de voyage en Italie, a work that appears on the surface to be mere reportage. Here, too, Tetel's analysis is a marvel of patience and subtlety. He begins by showing, from one veiled reference in the essay "Des boyteux," that Tasso's Paragone dell' Italia alla Francia forms the subtext not only for that essay but also for the journal, whose hidden themes reflect those of "Des boyteux." Tetel then moves on to consider the complex play between the Journal and the Essais as a whole, showing how the two complement each other. And he closes with a sensitive treatment of the relationship between the "Moi" of the Essais and the voyager of the journal. The Presences Italiennes thus offers much more than its title indicates, and it provides a model for the study of textual interplay.

Daniel Martin's L'architecture des |Essais' de Montaigne: memoire artificielle et mythologie (Paris: Nizet, 1992) is undoubtedly the strangest book to appear on Montaigne in a long time. It is based on the assumption that Montaigne had in mind a geometrical plan for the disposition of chapters in the Essais. Martin lays out this assumption graphically in a novel "illustrated introduction" that seeks to establish Montaigne's "thought patterns" with reference to sixteenth-century architecture (for the basic structure of the Essais) and sixteenth-century engravings of classical mythology (for the basic content of various chapters). This introduction does not present any kind of logical argument; rather, it suggests similitudes and correspondences between the text on the one hand and architecture and mythology on the other. This reliance on "similitude" suggests that Martin's is what Foucault would describe as a Renaissance mind.

At the heart of Martin's blueprint for the Essais lie two assumptions. First, the art of memory is fundamentally classificatory; as such, it plays the critical role in the arrangement of the text. Second, the loci, or "places" of memory, precede the text; they provide the material upon which Montaigne "essayed" himself in order to derive the text34). In theory, both assumptions are unexceptional. In practice, however, Martin applies them with such single-mindedness that he erects a bizarre edifice. He clusters the chapters of the Essais in symmetrical groups--the "wings" of the structure consisting of nine groups of five chapters each, and the center of five groups of three chapters each, plus two solitary chapters in the exact middle of the structure. Each chapter is derived from a locus signified by a mythological figure, and the position of each chapter within both its group and the overall structure signifies its "importance"--the closer the chapter to the center of its group (or of the overall structure), the greater its importance. Martin never really defines what he means by "importance," an analytical term that might have distracted him from his architectural preoccupations.

Martin's is an analogical study and, as such, it cannot withstand critical analysis. Nonetheless, it presents a suggestive (if overstated) model for how the Renaissance mind might have functioned, a mind shaped by rhetorical training in ways different from our own. Anyone interested in Renaissance literature might benefit from a playful glance at Martin's book, as long as one does not take its "principles" too literally.

A characteristic uniting all the above commemorative works is their insistence on contextualizing the Essais. They utilize distinctive aspects of Renaissance culture--sixteenth-century mnemonics, the themes resonating within humanist circles, the Renaissance culture of the book, the sixteenth-century language of economic discourse, and the Renaissance notion of melancholy--as means of understanding the text and author of the Essais. In other words, they insist on viewing the text in its appropriate cultural context. This insistence has become the dominant and distinctive feature of recent Renaissance literary and historical scholarship--on both sides of the Atlantic--and I would like to conclude my examination of recent French monographic studies with an excellent example of this tendency as applied to Ronsard's poetics.

Nathalie Dauvols' Mnemosyne: Ronsard, une poetique de la memoire (Paris: Champion, 1992) starts with the proposition that, just as the spread of alphabetic writing gave birth to the poetic consciousness of the Greeks, so too was poetic consciousness transformed by the spread of printing in the sixteenth century. In the classical tradition, poetry served as the vehicle of memory, preserving moral truths for posterity. As such, it was dominated by rhetorical techniques that combined moral and mnemonic functions. The spread of printing changed all this, making it possible for Ronsard to formulate a new kind of poetics that separated mnemonics from its moral purpose, subordinating it to poetic purposes.

In Dauvois' formulation, mnemonics was displaced from its moral function by the advent of the "library" (1-2). The availability of inexpensive editions--and the possibility of having one's own writings widely diffused-meant that poetry need no longer be subordinated to the purposes of cultural continuity. Instead, it could become a medium that existed for its own sake. According to Dauvois, one consequence of its new status was that poetry could have the kind of dialogue with itself that served to evoke, not the fragmented themes of the ancients, but their distinctive attributes--their style and voice, which could now be internalized thanks to the spread of printing. This dialogue was conducted in the language of myth. The didactic function of myth was supplanted by a purely literary one, in which the places of memory -- the topoi embedded in myths -- provided the arena for Ronsard's dialogue with the ancients, in which he discovered his own distinctive voice.

Dauvois' work may be regarded as complementing that of Thomas M. Greene and G. W. Pigman (among others), who have shown how the program of imitation/emulation served to develop the humanists' sense of their own uniqueness. Although she may give too much credit to printing -- the manuscript tradition also enabled one to assimilate the spirit of the ancients -- Dauvois nonetheless suggests how printing enabled the consequences of the humanist program of imitation to reach critical mass, transforming the nature of poetics.

In addition to the above monographs, the published proceedings of several conferences are also noteworthy. The French publish many more of these "actes" than we do, and most of them are rather meager. One exception, however, is an unusually meaty volume, L'homme de guerre au X VIe siecle, edited by Gabriel-Andre Perouse, Andre Thierry, and Andre Tournon (Saint-Etienne: Publications de l'universite de Saint-Etienne, 1992). This volume will undoubtedly be of interest to American scholars, who -- in the wake of such works as Ellery Schalk's From Valor to Pedigree (1986) and Kristen Neuschel's Word of Honor (1989) --are beginning to explore the cultural history of the European nobility. The volume is divided into four broad historical and literary topics, concerning the "image" of the man-of-arms, the propaganda and reality of his situation, his literary representation, and his language and iconography. Among the more unusual essays are James J. Supple's "Les annotations de Francois de La Noue sur l'Histoire des guerres d'Italie de Guiciardin," Charles Bene's "Erasme et les humanistes dalmates devant l'invasion turque," Jean Ceard's "La medicine de l'homme de guerre a la renaissance," and Colette Demaiziere's "Le vocabulaire de l'homme de guerre." In addition to La Noue and Erasmus a wide range of literary and military figures are covered in the volume, including (among others) Montaigne, Shakespeare, d'Aubigne, Brantome, Monluc, and Marguerite de Navarre.

La circulation des hommes et des oeuvres entre la France et l'Italie a l'epoque de la renaissance (Paris: Universite de la Sorbonne nouvelle, 1992,) is another significant collection, dealing with the difficult topic of cultural transmission. One might argue that the "circulation of men and works" is the true realm of the history of ideas -- only by understanding what gets transmitted, to whom, and by whom can we truly chart the history of influence and of style. The volume contributes to this worthy effort by detailing the travels of Italians in France, that of the French in Italy, and the reception of Italian humanist works in France. Among the more interesting essays dealing with Italian influences in France are Marina Marietti's "Les Rucellai en France: marchands, humanistes, diplomates," Francesco Furlan's "Reception florentine et fortune francaise de Leon Battista Alberti," and Jean-Louis Fournel's "Lectures francaises de Guichardin: verites historiques et ebauches d'une raison d'etat a la francaise."

One French visitor to Italy not included in the above volume is Etienne Pasquier, whose experience of Italian cultural hauteur fired his desire to assert the superiority of all things French over those of Italy. Unfortunately, Pasquier remains a largely neglected figure -- making the recent conference volume, Etienne Pasquier et ses |Recherches de la France' (Paris: Presses de l'ecole normale superieure, (1991), all the more noteworthy. Whereas some of the essays in this slender volume are highly specialized (such as B. Sayhi-Perigot's "A l'arriere-plan des Recherches I et II: |Le pourparler du prince' "), others are of more general interest (such as A. Gendre's "Pasquier depasse la doctrine de l'imitation"). Taken as a whole, the collection represents a good starting point (and one of the few recent ones) for the study of this important literary and historical figure.

I would like to close this review of recent French publications on the Renaissance with a consideration of two auxiliary works of scholarship. The first is the Bibliographie critique des editions anciennes de Jean Bodin, edited by Roland Crahay, Marie-Thersese Isaac, and Marie-Therese Lenger (Brussels: Academie royale de Belgique, 1991). This bibliography is a truly heroic work of scholarship, detailing all the editions of Bodin's works published during his lifetime, including (among other things) publication information, reproductions of title pages, names of the libraries holding each edition, and (most importantly) a stemma of the editions of each work. The latter is especially valuable in tracing the tangled genealogy of such works as Les six livres de la republique. Hopefully, this bibliography will help prepare the ground for a new intellectual biography of Bodin to replace Rene Chauvire's long outdated Jean Bodin, auteur de la Republique (1914).

The second auxiliary work is Michael J. Heath's critical edition of Rene de Lucinge's La maniere de lire l'histoire (Geneva: Droz, 1993). Lucinge was a Savoyard diplomat whose other major publications include De la naissance, duree et chute des estats (1588) and Dialogue du francois et du savoysien (1593). La maniere de lire l'histoire, first printed in 1614, is the product of his retirement in disgrace, after negotiating an unfavorable peace treaty with the French in 1601. It was only natural for Lucinge, a principal player in the events of his day, to meditate in retirement upon history, which was regarded (ideally) as a body of literature written by contemporaries of the events described. Indeed, in his dispatches to his masters, Lucinge had often functioned as a historian, dispassionately reporting on personalities and events.

His historiographical treatise, however, is most noteworthy as a contribution to the growing body of early modern literature about the reading, rather than the writing, of history. As such, it is directly indebted to Bodin's Methodus ad facilem cognitionem historiarum, the most famous treatment of this new subject. Such treatises reflect not only the impact of printing but also the emergence of a new attitude toward the past, one that is neither classical nor modern. Although it is still phrased in terms of the traditional Ciceronian commonplace, historia magistra vitae, this new attitude nonetheless transcends the exemplar theory of history, which began to break down under the weight of the diverse and contradictory examples revealed by printing. In their attempt to control this diversity, authors like Bodin and Lucinge formulated a distinctively Renaissance attitude toward the past, concerned with the spatial rather than temporal ordering of historical information. The nature of this new conception has yet to be fully explored, an endeavor that will be facilitated by Heath's fine edition of Lucinge's little known treatise.