Les Funerailles a la Renaissance: XI[I.sup.e] colloque international de la Societe Francaise d'Etude du Seizieme Siecle Bar-le-Duc, 2-5 decembre 1999.

Jean Balsamo, ed. Les Funerailles a la Renaissance: XI[I.sup.e] colloque international de la Societe Francaise d'Etude du Seizieme Siecle Bar-le-Duc, 2-5 decembre 1999.

Geneva: Librairie Droz S. A., 2002. Pbk. 535 pp. index. illus. map. n.p. ISBN: 2-600-00636-2.

This gathering of twenty-four papers constitutes an invaluable survey of current research in the culture and commemoration of death in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Organized into two parts, "Rites and Princely Memorials" and "Religious Polemics and Learned Discourses," the essays represent the promising yields to be gained by interdisciplinary collaboration. The reader can follow here the myriad circumstances of death among European elites of France, Germany, Portugal, and Italy, from ceremonial to burial, from sepulchral iconography to eulogy. Given the abundance of intriguing case studies here, as well as primary material, this collection will be essential to future work in the funerary arts and the anthropology of death in the early modern era.

Beginning with Monique Chatenet's itinerary of the wax effigy, introduced for the first time in 1503 for a prince, Pierre de Beaujeu, Duke of Bourbon, subsequent authors portray the stages and symbols employed for other prepossessing figures' exequies. Murielle Gaude-Ferragu itemizes the novelties of this same duke's funeral, which was organized by Anne de Beaujeu, from lit mortuaire to tomb, and with a unique emphasis on the inauguration of a successor and on an elaborate written chronicle. The grandiose designs of Emperor Maximilian I (d. 1519), which included the astounding figural cycle in the Hofkirche, Innsbruck, are depicted with perspicacity by Hubertus Gunther. Elizabeth A.R. Brown, to whose pioneering work many authors in this volume are indebted, in one of the most fascinating contributions analyzes post mortem feasting, royal ceremonial, and the legacy from antiquity. As a contrast with French royalty, Jean Guillaume offers the example of the multi-figured tombs of the aristocratic Gouffiers, while Ana Isabel Buescu examines the context of the monarchs of Portugal and the translation of King Manuel I in 1551. Giovanni Ricci studies the use of the effigy in northern Italy, beginning in 1559 with the lesser-known instance of Ercole d'Este II of Ferrara. Projected plans, such as those of the Guises, as described by Isabelle Balsamo, are given as much attention as realized ones in this compilation, and the desires of testators as well as the funeral and festival book and their stunning, emblematic bindings, presented by Georges Frechet, and Isabelle de Conihout Pascal Ract-Madoux are attended to. Many of these articles seek to qualify the groundbreaking inquiries of Ralph E. Giesey and Ernst Kantorowicz, either by implication or quite directly, but, taken as a group, they really illustrate how resilient and persuasive their insights continue to be.

Max Engammare's examination of Protestant values with respect to Calvin's burial ushers in part 2. Knowing that his grave might become an object of veneration, Calvin wished for a customary monument, though he called upon Moses' interment as a parallel. In the later sixteenth century, as Frank Lestringant demonstrates, cemeteries were inevitable battlegrounds between Protestants and Catholics over the fate of the body and the soul, while in Mexico, as Dominique de Courcelles shows, Christian rites coercively supplanted indigenous ones, and with revealing results. Marie Madeleine Fontaine and then Chiara Lastraiuoli analyze the bequest of the antique; the first, in Woeiriot's graphic illustrations of death among the ancient peoples of Greece, Rome, Egypt, and elsewhere (1556), and the second in Tommaso Porcacchi's Funerali antichi (1574). The final essays then broach the literary realm with greater focus. Sophie Garnier discusses the written memorial, such as the lament of the Grands Rhetoriqueurs, and Daniel Menager investigates the funerary eclogue. Scaliger's discourses are set in a new light by Marie-Dominique Legrand, while Isabelle Pantin and Michel Magnien resurrect the poetic tomb, and Marie-Francoise Piejus judiciously reminds us of the parodic oration.

The contributors together adumbrate a European context in which the living and the dead were always in conversation with one other, for the dream of death and the dream of worldly commemoration coalesced and found expression at the moment of passing. The original colloquium clearly demonstrated the possibility for cross-fertilization among disciplines, and it afforded proof of future roads to be taken. Art historians and literary specialists might consider ephemera, as well as the dialogue, one that went both ways, between sculpted and textual monuments. A question arises, too, as to the particular role of women as sponsors and as dedicated custodians of the afterlife. These scholars suggest the degree to which the consolation of the living, in artistic works and in literary ones, was meant both to defy the mercilessness of time and articulate exemplarity in the present.

MEREDITH J. GILL

University of Notre Dame