A Sceve Celebration: Delie 1544-1994.

This attractively produced volume of essays commemorates the 450th anniversary of the first publication of Maurice Sceve's Delie, "the most intense and tightly controlled verse written in the French Renaissance" (2). Ranging widely in methodology - broadly "phenomenological," historical, intertextual, musicological, "cosmographical," grammatical, phonological, and so on - the collection demonstrates the variety of interpretative possibilities that Sceve's masterpiece can suggest to modern readers. Like most commemorative volumes, however, this one displays the unevenness that can mar a collection of conference papers. I shall limit these brief remarks to the ones I found most useful.

Some of the articles reflect conflicts in Sceve criticism. Both Gerard Defaux and JoAnn DellaNeva, for example, treat the question of intertextuality but in very different ways. DellaNeva's essay shows how the Narcissus-Echo and the Actaeon-Diana myths function in the context of Sceve's imitatio of Petrarch, Ovid, and Pulci, and how the poet of the Delie moves from imitation to self-expression. On the other hand, using a very precise and narrowly focused methodology, Defaux's essay examines one dizain (D 17) as a reply to and rebuttal of the Marotic concept of ferme amours. The paper illustrates the argument of its first several pages that a contextual reading a la Defaux is the only valid way to read sixteenth-century texts. A number of the essays in this volume that strike me as anachronistic, impressionistic, unconvincing, or arbitrary, tend to bear out Defaux's methodological argument.

Despite its self-confidence, Defaux's main conclusion - that Sceve veers away from Marotic (hence Evangelical) conceptions of hierarchized love - conflicts with Francois Rigolot's essay explaining Sceve's obscurity in Pauline terms. It is curious that while Rigolot follows the earlier work of Lance Donaldson-Evans ("Love Divine, All Loves Excelling: Biblical Intertextualities in Sceve's Delie," French Forum, 14 [1989]) and Cynthia Skenazi (Maurice Sceve et la pensee chretienne [Geneva: Droz, 1992]), both of whom link Delie to Evangelical Christianity, neither one is cited by Defaux.

In another entirely different and fascinating register, Edwin M. Duval shows how the dizain in Sceve was, in its earliest state, a lyrical form originating in the Parisian chanson, and only later changing into the rhetorical form of the epigram. Duval also reveals a surprising aspect of Sceve in his role as a constant disciple - at least on the formal level - of his master, Clement Marot.

Cynthia Skenazi's beautifully written article, "L'harmonie dans la Delie: musique et poesie," is the theoretical and intertextual supplement to Duval's paper. Skenazi outlines with great clarity the importance in Delie of sixteenth-century music theory as diffused through Ficino's interpretations of Plato's Timaeus, and goes on to suggest the importance of musical models to the "polyphonic" composition of the Delie.

On the question of Sceve's obscurity, Gisele Mathieu-Castellani's study of the infinitive is a brief and penetrating analysis. The highly eccentric aspects of Sceve's grammar and syntax - including his use of the definite article with singular nouns, the substantified infinitive, and the participle - would constitute a Scevian grammar that avoids temporality and particularization, putting the poet's experience in a linguistic realm that is not the mythification of language and lived experience but rather its suspension between the two realms of myth and history.

Jerry C. Nash's analysis of "desires" in Delie discovers not one but five desires - the desire for knowledge, sexual desire, sensuous desire, spiritual desire, and the synthesis of the other four - and five different discourses to go with them. This bare summary of Nash's exposition is admittedly lacking nuance, and hence unfair, but I think Nash overstates the "differentness" of these desires the better to fuse them at the conclusion of his analysis. Nevertheless, it has the heuristic value of helping readers deafly understand the steps of Sceve's ladder of vision by the time they reach the final dizain 449, where Sceve obliterates the difference between ardeur and vertu.

JEROME SCHWARTZ University of Pittsburgh