Au-dela de la Poetique: Aristote et la litterature de la Renaissance. Beyond the Poetics: Aristotle and Early Modern Literature.

Ullrich G. Langer, ed. Au-dela de la Poetique: Aristote et la litterature de la Renaissance. Beyond the Poetics: Aristotle and Early Modern Literature.

Geneva: Librairie Droz S. A., 2002. 170 pp. index. [euro] 65. ISBN: 2-600-00698-2.

Literary studies of the Renaissance have often emphasized the importance of Neoplatonism and its influence on the anti-Scholastic movement. The stress of the popularity and diffusion of Ficinian idealism, primarily characteristic of the early Renaissance, can, however, lead to the false impression that Aristotle simply disappeared from literary and historical thinking until the full-fledged rediscovery of the Poetics in the seventeenth century. The articles in this intelligently organized and diligently researched volume work to dispel this myth by analyzing Aristotelian influences on the religious practice, literary criticism, and practical philosophy of the Renaissance.

The chronological center of this volume is the late sixteenth century. During this period the Aristotelian idea of prudence or practical wisdom experiences a revival countering the Neoplatonist idealism of the first half of the sixteenth century. But the volume does not limit itself to this narrow time period. Three of the nine articles examine earlier portions of the "long Renaissance." Jane Tylus analyzes the influence of Aristotelian practical philosophy on Catherine of Siena and the religious practice of women in fourteenth-century Italy. Francis Goyet illustrates the Aristotelian bases of Machiavelli's political thought, while Kathy Eden discusses the Peripatetic influence on the epistolary genre. Two articles, in turn, exceed the bounds of what (at least) the French consider their Renaissance. These articles, as suggested by the collection's title, go "beyond" the Poetics whose revival is generally accepted as the raison d'etre of French classicism. Richard Goodkin examines the influence of the Nicomachean Ethics on the theatrical practice of d'Aubignac, while Joshua Scodel's article shows how Dryden, in his defense of the English tradition, based his own argument on the Aristotelian concepts of the mean between two extremes.

The remaining four contributions concentrate on what can safely be called the Aristotelian revival of the late sixteenth century. They concentrate, not on the Poetics, whose availability in various forms dates from the mid-sixteenth century, but on Aristotle's political and ethical works. Francois Rigolot describes the popularity of the Ethics at the court of France's King Henry III and points out many indications of Montaigne's "conversion" to Aristotelianism in the allongeails of the Essais. John O'Brien likewise discusses Montaigne and the members of his intellectual familia. His reading of lessons from Theodor Zwinger's Theatrum vitae humanae--a work of clear Aristotelian influence--Justus Lipsius and Pierre Charron shows how the essayist alters the Aristotelian-Ciceronian definition of prudence centered on foresight by "reconceptualizing judgment in all its problematic necessity" (44). The remaining two articles move from the practical toward the philosophical and theological. The ideas of infinity and possibility provide an appropriate closing for this infinite subject. Ian McClean examines the extent to which the supposed central tenet of the "baroque," i.e. the destruction of the old cosmology at the hands of Bruno and Copernicus, influences the authors of German doctoral theses in the early seventeenth century. McClean identifies evidence of a continuing Paduan Aristotelianism that extends well into the seventeenth century and, surprisingly, few traces of the new theories of Copernicus and Bruno. Continuing the theme of infinity, Marie-Luce Demonet studies the existence of the idea of "possible worlds" in the "neo-scholastic" movement of the latter half of the sixteenth century. She shows how the emergence of these philosophical concepts relates to literary theory and allows for the postulation of a theoretical foundation for the modern novel.

It is clear that in a volume of this size a subject this vast can only be touched upon in specific points. This method, however, seems appropriate in a work centered around the proponent of induction. The collection nonetheless succeeds in addressing a wide range of subjects within a coherent thematic and temporal structure, indicating at once the extent of Aristotelian influence, while identifying the need for further research and exploration. One among many areas that invite further research is the influence of neo-Scholastic thought in the latter sixteenth century. Rather than looking at the "newness" of specific contributions of a specific period--such as the development of scientific method--this volume illustrates the necessity of analyzing authors and subjects individually, and within a limited "Aristotelian" field of inquiry. Authors of any period, particularly this period of flux and inconstancy that is the closing of the Renaissance and beginning of the baroque, can pick and choose the ideas they choose to deploy as Ian Mclean appropriately illustrates in his analysis of John Donne's poetic use of cosmological metaphors. The diversity of approaches present in this valuable volume work well together, proving sufficiently the point made in the work's introduction by Ullrich Langer: the importance of Aristotle and of the Aristotelian tradition cannot be reduced to a few "preceptes ramasses dans la Poetique" (11), but rather must be pursued through the examination of particular applications of specific Aristotelian concepts within their literary, social or philosophical context. This task has been well initiated by Langer et al.

RICHARD E. KEATLEY

Yale University