Dimensions of individuality: recent French works on the Renaissance.

In his famous "essay" of almost 150 years ago, Jacob Burckhardt articulated the single most fruitful idea about the Renaissance - that it was epitomized by "the discovery of the individual." This discovery was double-sided: Man became a geistiges Individuum and recognized himself as such; and, as a consequence of this recognition, he also came to perceive die Fulle des Individuellen in the world around him. In other words, with the self-conscious perception of one's own uniqueness came the perception of the world as being full of unique entities.

This discovery was for Burckhardt not an unalloyed blessing. His auf sich selbst gestellten Personlichkeit (so liberally translated as "free personality") is the individual stripped bare of all traditional defenses, standing naked before the world, with only his own wits to rely on - hardly a comforting prospect. And, by a similar twist, there is nothing to keep die Fulle des Individuellen from becoming an overwhelming diversity. Although Burckhardt did not elaborate upon this last theme, it is perfectly in keeping with his fundamental pessimism. A number of recent French works on the Renaissance have developed the positive and negative dimensions of Burckhardt's idea, demonstrating its continuing utility.

Jean Lecointe's L'Ideal et la difference: la perception de la personnalite litteraire a la Renaissance (Geneva: Droz, 1993) sets out to substantiate one aspect of Burckhardt's idea, namely the development of a subjective literary aesthetic. Burckhardt alludes to this complex theme, chiefly in his discussions of satire and the sonnet, without really elaborating upon it - its story lies outside the frame of his essay. Lecointe treats this theme in terms of the fragmentation of a classical literary ideal and its replacement by a new ideal, one that values individual differences in style.

Parts of this story - dealing with such issues as imitatio and copia - have been told before, by G.W. Pigman, Thomas Greene, and Terence Cave, among others. But Lecointe goes much further, placing these topics in a broader rhetorical and philosophical context. For example, he plays the notion of copia against that of brevitas, showing how the relationship between the two gradually changes from antiquity to the Renaissance, as brevitas usurps the quality of gravitas that had once been the preserve of copious discourse. This transformation marks the emergence of the new ideal of personal style, an ideal epitomized by the publication of the fifth edition of the Essais in 1588. Lecointe stops here, without pursuing the history of the new style, being content to show that in Montaigne's case it emerges by default of the old, the absence of which Montaigne sorely feels in the 1580 edition of the Essais. The emergence of his personal literary aesthetic is thus tinged with a sense of loss, and of uncertainty for the future.

Needless to say, Erasmus occupies a special place in the transition from the classical literary ideal to the ideal of stylistic individuality. His notion of decorum peculiare and its emergence from the rhetoric of ethos receives fine and subtle treatment at Lecointe's hands. And so too do a wide range of figures (especially Lemaire de Belges, Muret, Ramus, Bude, and Rabelais) and issues (concerning notions of genius, poetic "furor," and Ciceronianism, among many others). Such lists do not do justice to the encyclopedic scope of Lecointe's book, which projects sixteenth-century issues against the background of classical and medieval rhetoric and poetics. Indeed, despite the lack of an index, L'Ideal et la difference seems destined to become one of the principal reference works on the history of literary style in the Renaissance.

Marc Bizer's La Poesie au miroir: imitation et conscience de soi dans la poesie latine de la Pleiade (Paris: Champion, 1995) provides a nice supplement to Lecointe's broader study, exploring the complex relationship between imitation and self-expression in the Latin poetry of Joachim Du Bellay, Remy Belleau, and Jean-Antoine de Baif. In their French compositions, these poets readily "digested" classical models, transforming them into the instruments of personal expression. But the process of imitation/emulation was more difficult in their Latin compositions, where they confronted the need to disassociate themselves more clearly from their models and project their own voices amidst the clamor of ancient ones. They did so by infusing these compositions with what Bizer calls a "metadiscourse" that addressed the theory of imitation and its relationship to the art of poetry.

This metadiscourse is most apparent in Du Bellay's Amores, which is, at one level, about the love of classical love poetry, especially Catullus. It is also apparent in Belleau's Latin translations of French poetry, including not only Ronsard's work but also his own. As translator of Ronsard, Belleau assimilated the techniques of his more illustrious contemporary into his own literary aesthetic, which he sought to immortalize by translating his own vernacular poetry into Latin. And finally, the metadiscourse is apparent in Baif's work, where his heavy reliance on not only classical but also Renaissance Latin poetry intentionally blurs the distinction between imitation, translation, and outright theft.

Bizer's analysis of this body of Latin poetry is set against a background chapter on the theory of imitation in antiquity and the Renaissance. His treatment of this topic is especially noteworthy for its focus on the relationship between imitation and translation, the latter notion often being overlooked in studies of Renaissance rhetoric and poetics. Bizer's book is thus an important contribution to our understanding of how imitation - in both theory and practice served as an instrument of self-expression in the Renaissance.

The emergence of the idea of individuality in literature depends to some extent upon the establishment of a uniform instrument of expression. To paraphrase Burckhardt playfully, an objective consideration of the vernacular corresponds to the emergence of a subjective literary aesthetic. Josef Vachek has argued in Written Language Revisited (Amsterdam: John Benjamin, 1989) that printing accentuated the objective consideration of language. To this influence, Susan Baddeley also adds that of the Reformation, in L'Orthographe francaise au temps de la reforme (Geneva: Droz, 1993).

Baddeley analyzes three periods of orthographic reform in sixteenth-century France. The first, from 1500 to 1530, stems from humanist and Gallican circles in the French court, which were intent on distinguishing French culture from that of Italy. In the area of orthography, this meant eschewing spellings based on Latin etymologies in favor of those derived phonetically. The second period, from 1530 to 1550, marks the diffusion of this interest beyond the court, especially after the Day of the Placards, when reform-minded humanists and printers fled to Lyon, Geneva, and beyond. In this second period, orthographic reform became tied to religious reform, although the relation between the two is often complex. Calvin, for example, favors a more traditional orthography, perhaps out of an innate cultural conservatism. The third period, from 1550 to 1572, marks the establishment of the new orthographic principles in literature, chiefly through the influence of Ronsard. Baddeley's account concludes with a consideration of the 1572 edition of Ramus's Grammaire.

Baddeley does justice to the esoteric nature of her subject, tracing in detail the influence of not only individual authors and printers but also of specific editions. This kind of painstaking analysis is obviously not meant for the general reader. But all students of the period could, I think, benefit from a brief perusal of the book, which is an excellent case study of the connections between humanism, religious reform, and printing in the sixteenth century.

Olga Anna Dull's Folie et rhetorique dans la sottie (Geneva: Droz, 1994) develops another dimension of the Renaissance idea of individuality, one that implicitly modifies Burckhardt's interpretation of its origins. Burckhardt regards the discovery of the individual as a function of the objective consideration of the state as a Kunstwerk, an artifice of human calculation. This interpretation explains the special role of Italy in the civilization of the Renaissance, but it does not explain why Europeans in general so readily adopted the fruits of Renaissance culture. In contrast to Burckhardt, and more in accord with Cassirer and Huizinga, Dull shows how late medieval thought contributes to the discovery of the individual and, thus, how the Renaissance is as much the product of cultural evolution as of mutation.

Dull's study of the sottie is concerned with the interplay between rhetoric and folly as this dramatic genre evolved in the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Whereas Foucault and Bakhtin focus on the subversive aspects of folly, Dull begins by establishing its traditional role in the sottie, as a reinforcement of the moral hierarchy epitomized by Thomistic philosophy. In the wake of nominalist attacks on realism, however, folly becomes more an instrument of intuition than reason, demonstrating that universal moral truths can only be understood in their particular, concrete applications. This "natural folly" thus represents a kind of practical wisdom. Erasmus develops this theme in his Praise of Folly, but he also transcends it, elevating moral discourse from the practical to the divine plane.

Dull shows how the development of a "rhetoric of occasions" in the sottie parallels the rise of scholastic nominalism. The result is a dramatic genre that focuses attention on the individual and his or her circumstances. She thus adds another dimension to Burckhardt's view of Renaissance individuality, showing how the evolution of scholastic philosophy creates an individualizing view of the world in late medieval drama, a view encompassing both the situation of the knower and the individuality of what is known.

In her collection of articles, Monstres et chimeres: Montaigne, le texte et le fantasme (Paris: Champion, 1993), Fausta Garavini takes us further down the road of individuality, from folly toward madness, the most unrestrained form of individuality. Her introduction, written specifically for this collection, lays out the critical methodology underlying her perspective on Montaigne's book of the self. In an analysis of the famous passage from "De l'oisivete" that provides the title for her volume, she describes the Essais as a would-be "physick" for madness. This opens the door to the psychoanalysis of Montaigne, a door that she immediately slams shut, declaring that she is interested solely in the text rather than the author's psyche, which cannot really be detached from the text.

The chimeras and monsters she seeks are intimately bound up with the act of writing, as both the cause and the effect of Montaigne's literary process. They manifest themselves in the text as anomalies, fissures of psychic stress and release that Montaigne attempts to paper over and control with genial discourse. She reveals these anomalies by means of a "lecture du soupcon," exposing them as "les endroits ou le mecanisme se grippe, ou se produit la felure, en somme ou le controle se relache et l'ecriture revele des pulsions qui echappent a la verification du sujet ecrivant" (13).

In Garavini's approach, Montaigne's earliest, so-called "impersonal" essays assume the greatest importance, for they lie closest to the urge to write. Likewise, the earliest states of revised essays are the most revealing, for the revisions only serve to mask the urge, to fill the cracks through which the textual anomalies have oozed. This reading has the intriguing effect of turning Villey's evolution of the Essais topsy turvy, as Garavini seeks in the 1580 edition those ruptures most constitutive of Montaigne's psychic/literary persona. In these collected articles, however, she is resolutely inconclusive about the nature of this persona, remaining content simply to uncover some of its hidden manifestations rather than arranging them on some procrustean, psychoanalytic couch. Her approach is thus as frustrating as it is revealing, exploring various aspects of Montaigne's individuality without attempting to shape them into a coherent whole.

Garavini's view of his psychic ruptures notwithstanding, Montaigne's sheer geniality makes a profound impression, especially since he embraced with delight that side of the discovery of the individual characterized by die Fulle des Individuellen - that made most of his contemporaries uneasy. Of course, the humanists had unceasingly explored this dimension of the world, attempting not only to assimilate the distinctive literary styles of the ancients but also to understand their individual personalities and their unique historical circumstances. By the late sixteenth century, however, this activity began to undermine the universality of a wide range of classical norms, raising the specter of historical and cultural relativism. The wealth of individuality thus threatened to become too much of a good thing, calling forth attempts to control it by means of classificatory schemata.

Pierre Charron's De la sagesse is one of the most noteworthy of these classificatory efforts. In the seventeenth century, this treatise was praised by the so-called liberins erudits for its salutary skepticism and damned by conservative Catholics as the "breviary of the libertines." These attitudes have contributed to the modern view of De la sagesse as a protodeist work, subsuming faith under reason. Another, even more prevalent view dismisses Charron as "l'herbier de Montaigne," who desiccated the fruits of the Essais by systematizing them. In L'oeuvre de Pierre Charron, 1541-1603: litterature et theologie de Montaigne a Port-Royal (Paris: Champion, 1995), Christian Belin aims to dispel these misconceptions.

Belin restores Charron to his proper theological context, chiefly by interpreting De la sagesse in the light of Charron's earlier works, the Discours chrestiens and Les trois veritez. The latter work in particular complements De la sagesse, situating the search for moral wisdom within the broader context of divine sapentia. Thus, the proto-deist interpretation is anachronistic, and the label "l'herbier de Montaigne" is unfair, when one considers Charron's broader purpose.

De la sagesse is a syncretic work, attempting to distill from two millennia of moral philosophy a secular ideal of preud'hommie that is consonant with piety. Belin regards this syncretism as a form of criticism, designed to reveal the vanity of human wisdom without God. This critical process, according to Belin, also serves to reorganize and rewrite moral philosophy from a Christocentric perspective.

Belin's reinterpretation of Charron is both refreshing and salutary, restoring this thinker to his proper context and arguing forcefully for his originality. But - to venture a small criticism - Charron himself claimed that the originality of De la sagesse lay not in its derivative content but in its systematic form. He was in large part concerned with organizing the wealth of individuality that, by the end of the sixteenth century, had become oppressive in its superabundance. Belin is correct to argue that this systematization was fundamentally Christian; but, in so doing, he deemphasizes Charron's heartfelt need for order. It was this need that led his contemporaries to misinterpret him - and not without reason, since his drive for order had the unintended effect of reducing God to the status of a genus.

This same drive for order - and the inability of attaining it - is apparent in the career of Francois Beroalde de Verville. Beroalde exhibited encyclopedic tendencies in his early work but later tended toward anti-encyclopedism. Indeed, the course of his career exemplifies the disintegration of the classificatory enterprise in the late Renaissance, crushed under the growing weight of diversity. In response to this situation, Montaigne used all the resultant bits and pieces of information as means of essaying his own mind, which provided his point of orientation amidst complexity. In contrast, Charron, uneasy with Montaigne's blithe relativism, felt obliged to anchor the self to God by means of a hierarchical chain of being. Late in his career, Beroalde rejected the pretense of organizing knowledge hierarchically and adopted instead a covert program of self-portrayal, as Ilana Zinguer argues intriguingly in Le roman steganamorphique: Le voyage des princes fortunez de Beroalde de Verville (Paris: Champion, 1993).

Whereas Beroalde's earlier philosophical fiction, Le cabinet de Minerve (1596), uses architecture to promote an encyclopedic conception of knowledge, Le voyage des princes fortunez (1610) takes the form of a quest through an archipelago. It thus resembles Rabelais's Quart livre and Cinquiesme livre, although unlike them it is full of alchemical symbolism. Alchemy is the scientia that presumably shows the way to sapientia. Surprisingly, however, the novel does not prescribe a particular path to follow. There are several groups of travelers moving according to different itineraries, and these are so circuitous as to emphasize the trip rather than the destination. In this sense, Le voyage appears as a kind of anti-encyclopedia, in which knowledge is a quest rather than a goal.

In its emphasis on the process of knowing, Le voyage bears some superficial resemblance to the Essais, which might also be regarded as an anti-encyclopedia. According to Zinguer's interpretation, however, this resemblance is more than superficial, for the novel's characters and symbolic images all serve to represent the author's personal quest for knowledge, a quest that serves to display the self. Le voyage is thus a "steganographic" novel - encrypted, as it were. Or, to use another of Zinguer's descriptive terms, it is an anamorphosis - a distorted image that pops into focus when viewed through the proper optical device (78). All one need do is realize that in Beroalde's "emblematic" style of writing, "les motifs emblematiques deviennent des convoyeurs d'une interiorite de l'auteur (et non du narrateur) de Beroalde de Verville, de ce fait, la mise en scene porte sur le moi en scene, le moi masque, mais aussi le moi represente" (220).

Zinguer's interpretation goes a long way toward explaining Beroalde's deeply mysterious work, making its arcane imagery more comprehensible to the modern reader. One would do well to read her book in conjunction with Neil Kenny's The Palace of Secrets (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), which places Le voyage within the overall context of Beroalde's corpus. Kenny views Le voyage as an anti-encyclopedia - an interpretation that complements Zinguer's reading - for Beroalde's anti-encyclopedism (like Montaigne's) placed greater emphasis on the act of knowing and how it reflected the mind of the knower. The wealth of individuality that both called forth and overwhelmed static conceptions of order thus fostered a process of dynamic ordering that highlighted the knowing self. From here to the cogito is but a short step, with Descartes's radical solution to the problem of individuality serving to ring down the curtain on the Renaissance.

Such is the fate of review essays that their carefully elaborated order is inevitably crushed by the diversity of publications. Let me close by mentioning in passing some additional books worthy of notice. The French invasion of Italy in 1494, a seminal event in the history of the Renaissance, is often mentioned but rarely studied. A collection edited by Adelin Charles Fiorato, Italie 1494 (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne/Presses de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, 1994) helps remedy this deficiency, with articles on Savonarola, Charles VIII and the Borgias, Commynes and the Holy League, and diplomacy after 1494, among other topics. Of special interest is the nicely illustrated French translation of a Neapolitan chronicle detailing the French entry into that city.

Irena Backus's Le miracle de Laon (Paris: Vrin, 1994) is an analysis of several sixteenth-century accounts of a famous exorcism that took place in Laon in 1566. In his De summopere, Guillaume Postel interprets this event as proof of the supremacy of the Gallican church. His amanuensis, Jean Boulaese, wrote an account for instrumental purposes, to fund the publication of an Arabic translation of the Bible, as well as to advance his own career. Christophe de Hericourt, a church official in Laon, chiefly sought to avoid offending the Huguenots in his version. And Barthelemy de Faye, a moderate Gallican and Paris Parlementarian, used his account to support the Tridentine prohibition against absentee bishops. The different versions of this event thus serve to illuminate diverse aspects of religious sensibility in France during the Wars of Religion.

Marguerite of Valois, Queen of Navarre, is an interesting but neglected figure from this same period of French history. The best treatment of her remains J.H. Mariejol's biography, La vie de Marguerite de Valois (Paris: Hachette, 1928), to which we can now add Marguerite de France, reine de Navarre et son temps, eds. Madeleine Lazard and J. Cubelier de Beynac (Agen: Centre Matteo Bandello d'Agen, 1994). The papers in this volume, compiled from a colloquium held at Agen in 1991, cover a wide range of topics: Marguerite as queen and wife of Henry of Navarre; as author and patron; and as the subject of such contemporary writers as Brantome and Agrippa d'Aubigne. This volume is especially valuable for the glimpses it affords us of life in the kingdom of Navarre, one of the principal Huguenot strongholds in southern France.

Finally, to cast a glance at the other end of sixteenth-century Europe, we have an account of the diplomatic relations between the Hungarians and the Ottomans in the wake of the battle of Mohacs (1526), when the Turks slaughtered King Louis II and most of the Hungarian nobility. This defeat left the Hapsburgs free to assert their dynastic claim to the kingdom of Hungary, forcing Louis's successor, John Zapolyai, to treat with the Ottomans. Gabor Barta's La route qui mene a Istanbul, trans. Julia Manyik (Budapest: Akademiai Kiado, 1994) gives the first detailed account of the crucial events leading up to the Treaty of Istanbul (1528), in which Hungary became a vassal state of the Ottoman empire and a battleground for generations of inter-ethnic conflict, the consequences of which are with us still.

NORTHEASTERN ILLINOIS UNIVERSITY