Humanism in Practice, Influence, and Oblivion.

Christopher S. Celenza. Renaissance Humanism and the Papal Curia: Lapo da Castiglionchio the Younger's De curiae commodis. (Papers and Monographs of the American Academy in Rome, 31.) Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000. xiii + 244 pp. $47.50. ISBN: 0-472-10994-4.

Julia Haig Gaisser. Pierio Valeriano on the Ill Fortune of Learned Men: A Renaissance Humanist and His World. (Recentiores: Later Latin Texts and Contexts.) Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999. xiii + 362 pp. $52.50. ISBN: 0-472-11055-1.

Jon Haarberg. Parody and the Praise of Folly. (Acta Humaniora.) Oslo: Scandinavian University Press, 1998. 274 pp. NoK 294. ISBN: 82-00-12981-0.

Jill Kraye and M. W. F. Stone. Humanism and Early Modern Philosophy. (London Studies in the History of Philosophy.) London & New York: Routledge, 2000. xiii + 270 pp. $50. ISBN: 0-415-18616-1.

Philip Melanchthon. Orations on Philosophy and Education. Ed. Sachiko Kusukawa. Trans. Christine E Salazar. (Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. xxxix + 272 pp. $59.95 (cl), $22.95 (pbk). ISBN: 0-521-58350-0 (cl); 0-521- 58677-1 (pbk).

Kathleen Wine. Forgotten Virgo: Humanism and Absolutism in Honore d'Urfe's L'Astree. (Travaux du Grand Siecle, 15.) Geneva: Droz, 2000. 335 pp. n.p. ISBN: 2-600-00393-2.

The first three books listed above are expressions of the practice of humanism, the next two of its influence or outreach, and the last of its forgetting or oblivion even as it was being used. The time lines denoted by these three moments are represented roughly in these texts as 1400-1529, 1520-1650, and 1625-1700 respectively.

Christopher Celenza places us in the formative generation of Florentine humanism with his translation of Lapo da Castiglionchio the Younger's (1405-1438) most important work, De curiae commodis (On the Benefits of the Curia). As a mirror of the time, it is an extremely interesting dialogue, especially in its frank criticisms of the venality and lasciviousness of many who belonged to the papal bureaucracy, while at the same time its author defends the acquisitiveness and splendor of life in the curia as necessary to its proper functioning. The ambivalence apparent throughout the dialogue Celenza interprets as reflecting the position (social and intellectual) of its author. Celenza has produced a critical edition of the Latin text which is printed with the English translation on facing pages. The notes highlight all the classical allusions (or borrowings) and identify Lapo's contemporaries and the events he discusses.

Lapo was named for his father, a Florentine scholar who knew and admired Petrarch. His Florentine teachers were Leonardo Bruni and Francesco Filelfo. His aristocratic family had come on hard times and he needed patronage to survive as a scholar, but it always remained just beyond his grasp. When Filelfo came afoul of the Medici upon Cosimo's return from exile in 1434 and left for Siena, Lapo left with him, and in doing so lost any chance of obtaining patronage in his native city. He was not appointed to the position in Siena that Filelfo left behind in 1435, and although he obtained a teaching position in Bologna in 1436, ill health prevented him from assuming it. In 1437, with the help of a letter from Leonardo Bruni, he obtained a position with Cardinal Francesco Condulmer and accompanied him to the Council of Ferrara, which was about to open. To him Lapo dedicated his dialogue, designed to gain him entrance into the select company of humanist scholars employed in the papal curia. But a few months after he completed the dialogue he died at thirty-three. He was, therefore, as Celenza describes him, always a liminal participant in humanist culture, on the threshold trying to get inside but never fully succeeding in doing so. Lapo knew and admired many of the leading humanists of his generation (in addition to his teachers he mentions, among others, Poggio Bracciolini, Flavio Biondo, and Lorenzo Valla). He was involved in an important moment in the history of the church, translating documents from Greek into Latin during the early proceedings of the Council of Ferrara/Florence. All these elements -- humanism, the papal bureaucracy, the larger struggles in which the church was involved -- are ably described and analyzed by Celenza, who provides in four introductory chapters the cultural, political, and religious contexts in which Lapo composed his dialogue and offers interpretations of Lapo's place among his contemporaries.

Julia Haig Gaisser takes us to the waning of humanism, especially in papal Rome, with her translation of Pierio Valeriano's (1477-1558) On the Ill Fortune of Learned Men, composed in 1529 in the wake of the Sack of Rome by the Spanish troops of Charles V in 1527. Many who belonged to the humanist sodality in Rome either fled or were killed during the Sack. Valeriano creates a dialogue among eight interlocutors (six of whom belonged to the Roman humanist circle), who mourn not only the untimely deaths of these colleagues but also those of many other learned men from all parts of Italy, and well before the event that triggered the dialogue. At the end of the dialogue the causes of death previously discussed are summed up:

those who had been cheated of the honors they deserved, those who died after being afflicted with severe or long illnesses, or after being robbed of their goods, or in captivity; those who were overwhelmed by want and dragged out of their life in poverty; those who lost hope, who inflicted death on themselves, who were murdered by others; those whose reputation was stained with some conspicuous mark of disgrace. (241)

These afflictions, it is said, "are thought to disturb the course of happiness and to spoil the tranquil serenity of the quiet life that all scholars endeavor to achieve" (241). But, as another interlocutor points our:

To be killed or wounded, to be exposed to disgrace, to be tormented by illness, to be disappointed in one's hopes, to be cheated of one's reward are so much the natural possessions of each human being that the whole human race seems born for such disasters and disgrace. But this calamity is common not only to the learned but also to the ignorant, and it is allotted to the obscure and the noble alike. ... Wherefore, my good friend Colocci, when you proposed a discussion of the ill fortune of learned men, I think you erred in this respect -- that you did not warn us that you were going to speak instead about the calamities of the human race. (247)

This self-evident observation leads to a conclusion typically humanist: the learned have one advantage over the rest of humankind, namely, that what they have written will live after them and gain for them eternal fame. Classical writers (Ovid, Propertius) are cited in support of this view, as well as contemporary humanists whose deaths have been described (251-55).

Gaisser has not only published and translated this text (on facing pages) but has supplied "biographies" of all those discussed in the dialogue (261-330) and, in her introduction, recreated for us the ambience of the humanist sodality in Rome during the century preceding the Sack of Rome, added biographies of the eight interlocutors, and recounted the history of the translated text.

The author of this dialogue, Pierio Valeriano, was born into a poor family, but his uncle, Urbano Bolzanio, a Franciscan monk, was a well-connected teacher of Greek in Venice. Pierio studied in Venice with him as well as with Giorgio Valla and Marcantonio Sabellio, and in Padua with Leonico Tomeo and Marco Musuro (who translated many Greek works for the Aldine Press). Well prepared, he went to Rome, hoping to find favor "as a companion to great men" (14), and succeeded where Lapo had failed, through the Medici. When Giovanni de' Medici (whom Bolzanio had taught Greek) became Pope Leo X, Pierio had found his patron. Now he had access to everything in Rome, including its antiquities, and worked on hieroglyphics, as well as mentaries on Virgil and Catullus at the university (it was Valeriano's Catullus lectures that first interested Gaisser in him). His fortunes were temporarily reversed when Leo died in 1521, but improved still more when Giulia de' Medici was elected Pope Clement VII in 1523. Valeriano was cha rged with educating the papal nephews and spent most of the next few years in Florence. The Sack of Rome in 1527 led to a revolt in Florence against the Medici and the restoration of the republic. Valeriano fled with the Medici. In 1529, when Clement made his nephew Ippolito a cardinal, Valeriano received patronage from him that set him free financially to follow his own interests. From then until the end of his life he pursued his scholarly projects.

Both Gaisser's and Celenza's translations were published at virtually the same time by the University of Michigan Press. Together they form at least one set of bookends for humanism in Italy in several respects. Lapo lived in the heroic age of Florentine humanism and participated in the recovery of the papacy from the challenge of conciliarism; Valeriano lived to see the end of the humanist sodality in Rome and witnessed (though never seemed to understand) the Protestant challenge to the papacy. Both led peripatetic careers, but the first was snubbed, the second generously supported by the Medici.

From Italy we turn to Northern Europe and the apogee of the practice of humanism there in the person of Erasmus and his most enduring creation, Praise of Folly. Jon Haarberg's Parody and the Praise of Folly is his revised doctoral dissertation from the University of Oslo, Norway. He proposes to look at Erasmus's Praise of Folly as a literary critic which, he argues, has never systematically been done. Erasmus has been analyzed by biographers who have used this text to integrate it into the remainder of his work and so illuminate the interpretation of his life; by apologists who want to claim Erasmus for this or that position or cause; by intellectual historians interested in the relation between humanism and the Reformation or in the emergence of literature on the fool in early modern Europe. All of these approaches, Haarberg contends, have done less than justice to the text, because their starting point has been something else. But suppose we look at the text itself and ask ourselves the question: What can s tudying Praise of Folly as a literary document contribute to our understanding of it that all the other kinds of interpretations have missed? The prevalent interpretation begins with the obvious division that occurs within the declamation between a playfully bantering first section (about half the entire text), a seriously satirical second section against those in positions of power and responsibility, and a third section allying folly with Christianity. Interpreters seem to agree that Folly changes personas in each of these parts, and particularly in the final section when Folly drops her cover and says what she really believes (a position attributed by Haarberg especially to M. A. Screech). But Haarberg's intertextual analysis, an analysis that focuses on the largely classical writers quoted and (mostly) misquoted throughout the declamation, leads him to the conclusion that Folly never changes personas but remains the same, retaining her pose from beginning to end.

Haarberg arrives at this destination in two steps, the first less clear to me than the second. First, with the help of Aristotle and a number of modern literary critics (most notably Bakhtin), he identifies parody (rather than satire which belongs to the real world rather than to the text) as the guiding genre of Folly's speech. Her speech is an epideictic oration (an oration of praise and blame) in which she praises herself, she is neither fool nor sophist but a self-reflexive personification dressed in rhetoric, and functions as such in all three parts of the declamation. Her method -- and this is Haarberg's second step -- is to parody classical texts, to change them, however slightly, so that in her retelling they do nor say what they originally said. To cite only one example, Virgil's Aeneid 6.625-27 reads: "Even had I a hundred tongues, a hundred mouths/and a voice of iron, I yet could not include / every shape of crime or list every punishment's name." Folly replaces crime (scelerum) with fools (fatuoru m) and punishment (poenarum) with folly (stulticiae), devaluing the epic verses. Thus Virgil is used as an authority but at the same time undercut. In considerable detail, Haarberg goes through Foil/s citations of a number of classical authors, among literary figures Homer, Virgil, Aristophanes, Lucian, and Horace; among philosophers Seneca, Cicero, and Plato.

He also analyzes Praise v/Folly as an example of Menippean satire. He accepts Joel Relihan's argument in Ancient Menippean Satire (1993) that Menippean satire is characterized by a provocative mixture of forms (poetry and prose), a fantastic narrative, profound parody, and the ridicule of learning. Following the genre in to the Middle Ages, Relihan concludes that it comes to an end with the christianizing of European literature. Haarberg makes the case, however, that all four of Relihan's characteristics of the genre are present in Praise of Folly -- and among Erasmus's writings, only in that text -- as he sets out to show in some detail (194-223). In Menippean fashion, Folly at the end of her declamation disclaims what she has just ventured to establish:

I see that you are waiting for an epilogue, but you are crazy if you think I still have in mind what I have said, after pouring forth such a torrent of jumbled words. The old saying was "I hate a drinking-companion with a memory." Updated, it is "I hate a listener with a memory." Therefore, farewell, clap your hands, live well, drink your fill, most illustrious initiates of Folly (Clarence Miller, trans. [Yale, 1979] 138, cited in Haarberg, 205, n.98).

Folly here keeps her pose between the fool and the sophist, "unable to kill the irony" (206). Ambiguity reigns.

Haarberg's conclusion that Folly is all of a piece and cannot be "reduced" to occupying an identifiable position is probably predictable for a post-modernist critic. That having been said, Haarberg's close attention to the way Erasmus actually uses his sources is more fully treated here than in any other analysis of Folly with which I am acquainted. The evidence he has produced supports his reading and will need to be taken into account in future treatments of the book. But like all other interpretations of this elusive text, Haarberg's will also surely be challenged.

In Orations on Philosophy and Education, we meet a fellow humanist, correspondent, friend, and eulogist of Erasmus, Philip Melanchthon (1497-1560), though at the same time a person of very different temperament and allegiances. A professor of Greek at Wittenberg by the age of twenty-one and reformer with Martin Luther of the Protestant church in Germany, Melanchthon came to be known as the "Praeceptor Germaniae," the Teacher of Germany. In this collection of demonstrative orations ("the demonstrative speech praises or censures somebody, and is concerned to present a case to listeners as if they were spectators"; xxx) we get a glimpse of Melanchthon's legacy. Since he was so close a colleague of Luther, who banished Aristotle from the curriculum at Wittenberg and denied the possibility of an a priori or metaphysical knowledge of God based on reason, why and how did Melanchthon reintroduce Aristotle and other classical writers into the arts curriculum? Sachiko Kusukawa, who has written a book-length study of th e subject (The Transformation of Natural Philosophy: The Case of Philip Melanchthon, 1995), sets the context for us clearly in his introduction. The "why" has to do with the political chaos that followed Luther's initial break with Rome: the iconoclasm after the Diet of Worms (1521), the Zwickau prophets (1521-1522) who claimed a direct revelation from God, and the Peasants' revolt (1525), which threatened civil order. Melanchthon believed that the way to counter these tendencies was to find a positive use of law (similar to Calvin's "third use" of the law, never upheld by Luther -- though this disconnection from Luther is not explicitly made in the text under review). He therefore reintroduced the entire classical tradition of philosophy into the arts curriculum. On what grounds (how) did he do so? While, like Luther, Melanchthon rejected the possibility of an abstract (i.e., a priori) knowledge of God through reason, he believed it possible to attain an a posteriori knowledge of God through observation of t he effects of God's creation. Melanchthon, in fact, urged such observation and promoted Aristotle over Plato, the Stoics, and the Epicureans as a better guide to observing such effects. Appreciating the consequences of God's creation could confirm belief through faith, but would never lead one to affirm faith. The created order included everything from the observation of the heavens to the human soul; hence all the disciplines can be used to reinforce faith in the providence of God.

Melanchthon as humanist comes through as strongly in this anthology as Melanchthon the natural philosopher and creator of a "Lutheran philosophy." He extols the classics in the manner of many humanists before and contemporary with him, and indeed praises many of them in speeches devoted to them, most notably Erasmus, whom he extols for his learning and his early defense of Luther, mentioning but then passing over the theological differences between the two. Melanchthon sounds much like Erasmus when he writes in 1540: "Everywhere poor scholars are neglected, and this is done intentionally, so that studies be destroyed" (150). His plaint also has much in common with Valeriano's dialogue (discussed above), penned only eleven years before.

The anthology fills a gap, as Ralph Keen's Melanchthon Reader (1988) is out of print. This new one will provide the student with a good picture of Melanchthon the humanist and philosopher (or humanist philosopher if that term is allowable). For Melanchthon the theologian one must turn to his Loci Communes or his biblical commentaries (the commentary on Colossians is translated), or his commentary on the Augsburg Confession (in the writing of which he played a central role).

From one humanist philosopher we move to a book that attempts to relate humanism to philosophy on a much broader scale. The editors of Humanism and Early Modern Philosophy assert that The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy (1986) and Renaissance Philosophy (vol. 3, 1992) have made little impact on scholars based in departments of philosophy. They hope the present volume will fare better. The only possibility of its doing so, so far as I can see, would be the impetus that reading some of the essays in the volume might give to its readers to want to know more or to know more systematically, and so send them to the neglected histories. How likely are (any of) the essays presented here to produce that effect?

The essays are arranged somewhat chronologically by subject from the mid-1400s to the mid-1600s. The first essay, on Valla (by John Monfasani), deals with a humanist's theology rather than his philosophy. Monfasani demonstrates and then concludes that "Lorenzo Valla was no theologian" (13). He suggests that Valla's theological assertions grew out of various historical supporters and opponents with whom he was involved at any given moment and were thus more exercises in "self-fashioning" ("his aims, depending on which work is at issue, were rather primarily cultural, social, philosophical or even political"; 13) than they were reflective of a consistent theological vision. A likely reaction among readers is that we can dismiss Valla as a religious thinker. But what of his connections to philosophy? J. R. Milton, in his essay "Delicate Learning: Erudition and Philosophy," says the following about the history of philosophy from Valla to Descartes:

Valla was ... by no means typical of Renaissance philosophers, and his work on logic had much less influence than either his unmasking of the Donation of Constantine or the Elegantiae linguae Latinae. He remains nevertheless a striking figure, as far out on one wing as Descartes two centuries later was to be on the other; for that reason the contrast between them is all the more instructive. Descartes's philosophy is founded on a rejection of custom and example, Valla's on an enthronement of it, as the arbiter not merely of elegance but of intelligibility. (169)

Milton's essay, placed eighth in the book, would have been my candidate for lead essay. He provides a simple but clear raxonomical contrast between Renaissance philosophers and Descartes: that Renaissance philosophers sought to imitate the ancients which required great erudition, while modern philosophers, beginning with Descartes (Malebranche, Leibniz, Locke, Newton, and Hume are also mentioned in this connection) were either not learned or, if they were, their learning played no role in their philosophy. A provocative idea with which to reflect upon the relation of humanism to philosophy.

M. W. F. Stone's essay, "The Adoption and Rejection of Aristotelian Moral Philosophy in Reformed 'Casuistry'" (the longest essay in the collection), is directly related to the anthology of Melanchthon's orations. While, as we have seen above, Melanchthon based his ethics on Aristotelian moral philosophy, separating it completely from theology (following Luther's separation of law and gospel) -- a model which spread to Protestant universities all over Europe -- a reaction against their separation and a desire to create a "theological ethics" that would bypass Aristotle and unite faith with religious practice arose among Calvinists even before the end of the sixteenth century and in large measure, succeeded in the seventeenth in overthrowing Melanchthon's model. Perhaps, Stone concludes, the person who would have been most vindicated by this development was Peter Ramus (1515-1572) who was denied a prized chair in ethics at Heidelberg by the Aristotelians there as well as a teaching position at the Geneva Academ y by Theodore Beza. Ramus, he believes, "would no doubt have enjoyed the delicious irony that future generations of ethical thinkers within the Reformed tradition would look, not to the Nicomachean Ethics, but rather to his own division of theology as a basis from which to construct a practical divinity" (79).

Three of the essays are particularly interesting, relating the humanist attention to classical texts to some of the consequences of their recovery. Charles Lohr discusses, in "Latin Translations of the Greek Commentaries on Aristotle," a number of such translations by humanists, concluding that "through these Latin translations the Greek commentaries on Aristotle contributed to the Renaissance liberation of science from the one-sided interpretation of the Philosopher which the scholastics had inherited from Averroes" (34). And Luca Bianchi, in "From Jacques Lefevre d' Etaples to Giulio Landi: Uses of the Dialogue in Renaissance Aristotelianism," discovers that among the many purposes served by the Renaissance dialogue, one was to explain, interpret, discuss, and spread Aristotle's thought (41). Jill Kraye details the discovery in the seventeenth century that Marcus Aurelius in his Meditations Concerning Himself (this title also dates from the seventeenth century) was a Stoic; only from that time was his work added to the Stoic corpus of writings.

Two essays are versions of intellectual biography. A. H. T. Levi, in "The Relationship of Stoicism and Scepticism: Justus Lipsius," discusses the complicated personality of Justus Lipsius (1547-1606): his changes in religious affiliation (from Catholic to Lutheran to Calvinist and then back to Catholic); his philological and scholarly interests, especially in Stoicism (he edited Seneca and wrote on Stoic philosophy); and his public career as academic and administrator in a Europe seething with religious wars to which he was strongly opposed (believing that the differences among Christian groups were negligible). Levi suggests caution against too easily placing Lipsius, or other figures of this era, in some fixed category (in Lipsius's case "Stoic" or "skeptic"). Brian Vickers does more than caution; in "The Myth of Francis Bacon's 'Anti-humanism'" he vigorously defends Bacon against the charge in the title based on a much quoted passage from The Advancement of Learning (cited extensively, 138-40), often regar ded as an attack on Renaissance humanism. The attack, Vickers contends, is not against Renaissance humanism (assuming that such a category was even available to Bacon) but against the excessive imitation of Cicero's Latin style, part of a larger dispute about imitatio. Vickers discusses this debate extensively and details Bacon's indebtedness to humanism, especially its rhetorical style.

The final four of the twelve essays comprising this volume relate humanism to science in various ways. Susan James, in "Grandeur and the Mechanical Philosophy," follows a strategy used by many intellectual historians in describing fundamental transitions in history: tracing changes in the meanings of words. She discusses the transformation of the meaning of "grandeur" from display and distance (through dress, architectural splendor, etc.) used by rulers to reinforce their power to the "scientific" meaning of marvelousness of structure and detail, as of an insect under a microscope. She spells out how this was achieved through the writings of Descartes and Malebranche (among others) and concludes that in order to gain a hearing, a word -- "grandeur" -- generally agreed to provoke strong passions and to create influence and power, was borrowed and used to subvert the values of the people these protagonists of science needed to persuade. Thus they rode under its banner and established "the New Science as an exem plum of greatness" (188). A second essay (by Margaret Osler) demonstrates yet another characteristic of times of transition, the lingering of old authorities (in this case Aristotle) even while they are being transformed. Thus Gassendi accepted Aristotle's notion of four causes, but he transformed "final cause" from meaning the internal teleology of a thing (its end) to God as final cause of the universe, that is, he removed final cause from the object altogether, reducing the cause of the object to its "efficient cause" (which science normatively does). James Hankins, in "Galileo, Ficino and Renaissance Platonism," shows how Ficino's commentary on Plato's Timaeus may have been the basis of Galileo's "Platonism," giving him a philosophical wedge against Aristotle to argue that all heavenly motion is circular and that there is a homogeneity of the elemental and celestial regions, thus allowing the possibility of change in the latter as well as in the former -- both notions essential to the transformation from Aristotelian/Ptolemaic to Galilean/Copernican physics and astronomy. Finally, Christia Mercer, in "Humanist Platonism in Seventeenth-Century Germany," argues that those who have sought the source of the Platonic influence on Leibniz have looked too far, for in the very region where he lived was "a group of well-respected Protestant German Platonists who energetically lectured on Platonism and furiously published books in which it played a major role" (239). She discusses particularly Johann Adam Scherzer (1628-1683) and Erhard Weigel (1625-1699) who believed, like Leibniz, that philosophy had to be wrested "from the hands of the (mostly) incompetent scholastics and set on the correct, non-sectarian and conciliatory course" (249). The course they envisioned drew from Ficino and Pico -- without Pico's belief in the mutual coherence of all philosophical traditions but with the conviction that truth was nonetheless achievable with the aid of divine illumination.

There are insights to be gleaned from each of these essays, and though episodic, this collection might well generate enough enthusiasm among some readers to send those who have not consulted them to the recent histories of Renaissance philosophy -- and other detailed, but more limited monographs.

We turn finally to a book that plots the forgetting of humanism. Kathleen Wine's Forgotten Virgo: Humanism and Absolutism in Honore d'Urfe's L'Astree is a commentary on parts 1-8 of L'Astree (volumes 1-4 in the modern French edition, ed. Hugues Vaganay, Lyon, 1925-1928). Only part 1 exists in a modern English translation (Astrea, trans. Steven Rendall, Binghamton, NY, 1995). As an alternative detailed and technical reading of L'Astree, Wine's study is aimed at her fellow scholars.

Honore d'Urfe (1568-1625) was born in southern France and sets his novel in his ancestral seat, calling the place Forez. He says that the novel commemorates a youthful love affair, and thus proclaims it autobiographical. But d'Urfe also fought during the religious civil wars on the side of the Catholic League and was twice imprisoned. Later he made his peace with the ascension to the throne of Henri IV (1598-1610), who created the foundation of an absolute monarchy. To him d"urfe dedicated volume 2 of L'Astree (he dedicated volume 3 to Louis XIII). His pastoral romance, published in five volumes between 1607 and 1625 (volume 5, completed by d'Urfe's secretary Balthazar Baro, brought the story to an end), integrated both autobiographical and political elements. Wine specifies the intricate relation between the two elements, but argues throughout that the autobiographical narrative of youthful love effaces the larger political narrative through an act of forgetting, setting the stage for later French literatur e which found in private life a space to operate free of political considerations. Wine surmises that the later French novel probably would have been very different if d'Urfe had connected the public and the private rather than effacing (or forgetting) the public in favor of the private.

How d'Urfe carries out this purpose constitutes the substance of Wine's study. She says that she does

not pretend to analyze in any detail the intricacies of d'Urfe's treatment of love per se, nor the critical responses it has inspired. My abiding concern is with the way L'Astree coheres as myth and thus with the underlying consistency of the political, literary and erotic elements that structure it. (265-66)

So, then, what is the myth, and how does it relate to politics, literature, and love?

The Astraea of the title was "the virgin goddess of justice,... last of the immortals to quit the earth at the end of the Golden Age, when she would take her place in the heavens as the constellation Virgo" (18). But it was through Virgil that she came to be understood in the West. Virgil's fourth Eclogue predicted the coming of Virgo (Astraea), which Christians elided with the Virgin Mary and the birth of Christ. Virgil developed the symbol in his Aeneid where he identified the new age with the peace brought by the emperor Augustus. (The French and English monarchies annexed Astraea in the sixteenth century to support their claims that they had inherited the mantle of Rome. Thus Astraea was associated simultaneously with empire and with the renewal of the ancient arts and sciences.)

In Virgil's epic framework the Trojan kingdom is destined to be recreated in Rome. In d'Urfe's story the ancient kingdom to be recreated by the current imperial dynasty of France is Gaul, represented in French medieval sources as predating both Greece and Rome (Ariosto, Tasso, and Spenser had followed the same strategy). The setting of L'Astree, in fact, is the fifth century AD, when the Franks entered Gaul. D'Urfe focuses on the transition from the pre-Roman rule of the Gauls to the Frankish dynasty, exemplified in the change of name from Gaul to France. D'Urfe's sources made the Gauls and Franks ancient relatives; his Franks, like Aeneas, were returning to their ancestral home. The Romans are represented as entering the country to resolve a dispute between Gauls and Franks (analogously, France's troubles in d'Urfe's time were due to civil conflict between Catholics and Protestants). Instead of mediating, the Romans took over the country (in d'Urfe's time Spain and the papacy were regarded as threats to the Gallican church). In establishing their rule after the Roman retreat, the Franks are represented as restoring ancient institutions, anticipating the mission of their distant descendant Henri. Moreover, the founder of the Merovingian dynasty, King merovee, encouraged marriage between Franks and Gauls just as Aeneas encouraged the union of Trojans with their Latin cousins. Thus Aeneas becomes the father of a race as, by analogy; does King Merovee, while Augustus and Henri become embodiments of the races created. Still further, the Gauls embody an even more ancient civilization, founded by Dis Samothes who brought to Gaul the science and religion he had learned from his grandfather Noah. But only in Forez did this ancient religion survive into the fifth century. Thus if the Gauls are able to pass on to the Franks and to their seventeenth-century descendants the essence of an enlightened past, it is thanks to the homeland of Honore d'Urfe.

It would seem then that pastoral is subordinated to epic. But according to Wine that is only seemingly so. For L'Astree

acknowledges neither the debt of French civilization to the Greco-Roman past nor the dependence of the archaic world of pastoral on the rising empire that will preserve and transform it. Ultimately, this dual departure from tradition amounts to a refusal of the twin burdens of humanism and absolutism. Such a refusal ... lays the mythical groundwork for a reordering of the political and cultural terrain that would enable aristocrats and artistic writers to replace kings and humanists as the guardians of French civilization. (110)

Modern scholars view L'Astree in one of two ways. Norbert Elisas interprets the novel to "exemplify internal contradictions in the French nobility's resistance to the expansion of royal power" (111). Once Henri IV assumed the throne after the civil wars had ended, the center of gravity shifted to the court, with a corresponding loss of power among the nobility. The nobles were bound to the court but shorn of power, and looked back longingly at the feudal independence of their forebears. Elias regards L'Astree "as the quintessential expression of the paradoxical nostalgia of such disempowered elites" (111). D'Urfe's contemporaries, on the other hand, viewed the matter in precisely the reverse way, seeing the novel as playing a formative role in the re-education of the nobility to new standards of civility and cultivation that emerged after the civil wars, a judgment literary historians have by and large followed. Thus the novel either belongs to the cultural vanguard or is an expression of the impotence of the nobility.

Wine suggests a third interpretation: the return from epic to pastoral. This return at once dramatizes the increasing importance of courtly cultivation in defining aristocratic identity and implies a liberation of courtesy from the court, leading her to conclude that,

whereas the traditional progress from pastoral through epic [as in Virgil] entails the interdependence of these values, d'Urfe's pastoral regress implies their independence. By reversing the Virgilian paradigm, d'Urfe severs the ties that had hitherto bound pastoral to epic and national culture to the monarchy. (119)

The reversal is evident in his dedications to Henri IV and Louis XIII (which appear to subordinate pastoral to epic) and his prefaces (which reverse the hierarchy). And in the story itself, he shifts from epic to amorous themes. This shift entails two reversals of direction: first, a rejection of absolutism and its court culture in favor of a private autonomy; and second, a rejection of humanism as the bearer of the epic and absolutist tradition. The pastoral tradition of the past had been a self-consciously learned tradition, an encyclopedia of knowledge. L'Astree transmits this knowledge but also offers a model for forgetting its sources. The model is to set the pastoral drama in a time that predates Roman and Greek civilization, to say nothing of more recent predecessors, so that there is no need to cite sources. The citations common to other writers of pastoral disappear in L'Astree. In portraying Astraea d'Urfe makes none of the classical associations of the name -- even though they inform his work. Thus he harnesses the legacy of humanism to insure its forgetting.

Wine's interpretation can be considered a challenge to Jean DeJean, who writes in Tender Geographies: Women and the Origins of the Novel in Seventeenth-Century France (Columbia University Press, 1991): "The bond forged [in Madeleine de Scudery's Artamene, 1649] between prose fiction and political subversion marks the origin of the modern French novel; it is the founding gesture that makes Artamene, rather than Astree, the earliest indication of prose fiction's definitive early modern tradition" (45--46, emphasis added). Wine barely mentions DeJean, but these two interpretations seem to me destined to confront one another in future discussions of the origin and the meaning of the origin of the French novel.

In these books regarded collectively -- and to the extent that we take their claims at face value -- humanism is exemplified (in Lapo, Valeriano, and Erasmus), extended in outreach (to the Reformation, to philosophy, and to science), and, finally, forgotten (in d'Urfe and those who read him). This shorthand is a reflection of what turned out to be the historical destiny of humanism between 1400 and 1625 or thereabouts -- a destiny that has been in part reversed during the past century by a library of studies that have helped us to remember the movement, its influence, and its forgetting.