Menippean Satire and the Republic of Letters: 1581-1655.

Ingrid De Smet. (Travaux du Grand Siecle, 2.) Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1996. 296 pp. SF 75,30. ISBN 2-600- 00147-6

As Burckhardt recognized in The Civilization of the Renaissance, "modern wit and satire" have their origins in the Renaissance humanists, and both verse and narrative satire were important genres in the humanists' literary repertoires. In recent years our knowledge of the humanists' understanding of the ancient genre of Menippean satire, both Greek and Latin, has grown considerably, and Ingrid De Smet's book serves to further that understanding in its analysis of Northern European examples of this form in the later Renaissance.

While most students of Menippean satire have focused on the Greek sources from which the form originates, De Smet focuses her typology on the later life of Menippean satire among the Romans. Delineating two major types, the "Varronian Satire" and a Petronian variant, she construes the form quite strictly, defining these satires as "fictional . . . narratives in prose interspersed with verse . . . aimed at mockery and ridicule" (70). Such critical formalism necessarily excludes Lucian, whose dialogues do not exactly match this definition, as well as the mock encomium, which many scholars have included as a form of Menippean satire for a variety of reasons - not the least of which is its place in the Cynical tradition of the Greeks. In keeping with this Latin definition of the form, De Smet traces a substantial and coherent tradition of neo-Latin imitations of the Menippean satire, focusing especially on Senecas Apocolocyntosis, a work that emerges in her study as the purest example of the Menippean form. Often cast as a dream narrative and including an underworld trial, this satirical form became popular in the sixteenth century in contexts which were generally learned or academic. Juan Luis Vives's Somnium Vivis, a brief preface to his commentary on Macrobius's Somnium Scipionis, is an early example of this satirical dream narrative, and in the later part of the century the most influential proponent of the form would be Justus Lipsius, whose Somnium pillories academic pedantry in the editing (or mangling) of classical texts. De Smet traces the later survival of this narrative type in satires by Nicolas Rigault, Daniel Heinsius, Joseph Scaliger, Gaspar Scioppius, and others.

De Smet is at her best when pursuing the topical features of these satires, and her bibliographical detective work has uncovered many important details necessary for a full understanding of these works. In many of her examples the Menippean form provides its authors with a measure of camouflage so that they can pursue political critique, while at other times the ad hominem nature of the satire necessitates employing anonymity (often, however, by the use of simple and easily decipherable anagrams). Her survey of the humanists' understanding of the genre of satire is helpful and comprehensive, and her discussion of individual satirists shows remarkable breadth in her mastery of a widely diffused secondary literature. De Smet's study usefully traces the development of the Menippean satire into the seventeenth century, by which time the "republic of letters" indicated in her title had given way to a less academic culture of the salon, but where this form of satire still retained its learned pedigree and remained an effective means of ridiculing enemies. With its extensive bibliographical materials, this book will enable students of the later Renaissance to sample and explore further a somewhat recondite and linguistically challenging literary form that accompanied the rise of scholarship in the early modern world.

W. SCOTT BLANCHARD College Misericordia