Langage et verite: Etudes offertes a Jean-Claude Margolin par ses collegues, ses collaborateurs, ses eleves et ses amis.Professor Margolin is no doubt less well known in this country than in Europe, where he is widely regarded as one of the few remaining giants of Renaissance scholarship: a multilingual polymath pol·y·math n. A person of great or varied learning. [Greek polumath equally at ease with Erasmus (114 publications out of a total of 304), with several dozen other Renaissance authors both celebrated and obscure, with basic issues of literary and intellectual history, and also with more modern writers including Bachelard and Sartre. The 26 articles in this volume are certainly an adequate tribute to the breadth of Margolin's scholarship, if not always to its depth. There are only four pieces on Erasmus (Leon-E. Halkin, J.-M. De Bujanda, Jean-Pierre Vanden Branden and Germain Marc'hadour); also four on "major" French literary figures (Eva Kushner on Pontus de Tyard Pontus de Tyard (c. 1521 - September 23, 1605) was a French poet and priest, a member of "La Pléiade". He was born at Bissy-sur-Fley in Burgundy, of which he was seigneur, but the exact year of his birth is uncertain. , I.D. McFarlane on d'Aubigne, Gerard Defaux on Marot and Jean Lafond on Rabelais); five on little-known or extra-literary figures (Andre Godin on Jean Vitrier, Frank Lestringant on Crespin's and Goulart's martyrologies, Robert Sauzet on Anne Rulman, Maurice de Gandillac on Nicolas of Cusa, Pierre Aquilon on Jean de La Rebertiere); and a satisfying number on non-French literature: one Polish (M. Cytowska on Modrzewski), two Italian (Cesare Vasoli on Ficino, written in Italian, and Achille Olivieri on Ortensio Lando), two Portuguese (Yves Pelicier and Jorge A. Osorio), one Spanish (Augustin Redondo on Cervantes) and one English (Marie-Therese Jones-Davies on irony and lying in Shakespeare). Perhaps unsurprisingly, in view of the length restrictions obviously imposed on contributors, only six authors treat broad topics rather than individual writers: Michel Reulos discusses the use of proverbs Proverbs, book of the Bible. It is a collection of sayings, many of them moral maxims, in no special order. The teaching is of a practical nature; it does not dwell on the salvation-historical traditions of Israel, but is individual and universal based on the in customary law, Alain Michel the praising of folly from Cicero to Giordano Bruno Noun 1. Giordano Bruno - Italian philosopher who used Copernican principles to develop a pantheistic monistic philosophy; condemned for heresy by the Inquisition and burned at the stake (1548-1600) Bruno , Marie-Luce Demonet-Launay the relationship of language to truth for Renaissance thinkers, Jean Delumeau Jean Delumeau (b. June 18, 1923 Nantes) is a French historian specializing in the Catholic church history and author of several books regarding the subject. He teaches at the Collège de France and is a member of the Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres. the theme of the Earthly Paradise Earthly Paradise place of beauty, peace, and immortality, believed in the Middle Ages to exist in some undiscovered land. [Eur. Legend: Benét, 298] See : Paradise in Reformation theology, Paulette Chone the symbolism of the lamp from Plutarch to Edmond Jabes, and Josephe Jacquiot representational rep·re·sen·ta·tion·al adj. Of or relating to representation, especially to realistic graphic representation. rep truth in some medal portraits of Renaissance princes. Unusually for a collective volume, a majority of these articles are actually concerned with the language/truth relation of the book's title. Some contain detailed information new to me, though probably not new to Margolin; for instance, on which works by Erasmus ended up on which Index (Bujanda), or on the importance of the New World for Portuguese humanist thought (Pelicier). Many have thought-provoking insights into the use of language in a variety of contexts, but too many, in my opinion, are not scholarly articles, but rather what Gandillac is honest enough to characterize as "quelques rapides notes" (195). The memorable contributions, to this reviewer, are four: Father Marc'hadour's delightful discussion of Desire Nisard as translator of Erasmus and More, couched in the form of a personal letter to Margolin; Defaux's convincing demonstration that Marot's "Contre l'inique" epigram epigram, a short, polished, pithy saying, usually in verse, often with a satiric or paradoxical twist at the end. The term was originally applied by the Greeks to the inscriptions on stones. is indeed an attack on Dolet, not on Des Periers; Demonet-Launay's fascinating (but over-dense) recapitulation recapitulation, theory, stated as the biogenetic law by E. H. Haeckel, that the embryological development of the individual repeats the stages in the evolutionary development of the species. of humanist views on language and truth, with a small anthology of comments on the Psammeticus/becus fable (232); and Redondo's lively analysis of the helmet of Mambrino episode in Don Quixote. The volume also contains a brief "Avant-Propos" by Jean Ceard, a one-page biography of Margolin, and a bibliography of his publications. As a tribute to a truly great scholar it appears a little thin, but it undoubtedly contains much to interest scholars in a wide variety of fields. Barbara C. Bowen VANDERBILT UNIVERSITY Vanderbilt University, at Nashville, Tenn.; coeducational; chartered 1872 as Central Univ. of Methodist Episcopal Church, founded and renamed 1873, opened 1875 through a gift from Cornelius Vanderbilt. Until 1914 it operated under the auspices of the Methodist Church. |
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