Mythologie et rhetorique aux XVe et XVie siecles en France.

Herve Campangne. (Etudes et Essais sur la Renaissance, 12). Paris: Champion, 1996. 293 pp. FF 320. ISBN: 2-8520-3571-5.

This is an erudite, informative, challenging, and exasperating book. It attempts to be both an overview of rhetorical attitudes to mythography in Renaissance France, and a modern critical evaluation of these attitudes. Ovid's Metamorphoses is naturally enough the central focus, and the concept of metamorphosis and related terms is conscientiously traced from Martianus Capella to late sixteenth-century emblems.

Chapter 1 provides some medieval background to the main dilemmas treated here (does mythology belong to philosophy or to rhetoric? is poetry mere ornament or profound science?), and discusses in detail two little-known works, Jacques Legrand's Archiloge Sophie and Jehan Thenaud's Traite de science poetique. Later authors, especially Fabri, Peletier, and Fouquelin, are seen as tending to reduce Classical mythology to rhetorical ornament.

The second chapter, on Renaissance translations of Ovid, is packed with interesting information and quotation, about attitudes to the relationship between text and gloss, original and translation, allegory and analogy, elocutio and inventio. Terms analyzed in detail include mutation, translater, integumentum, and subtillement (following Cerquiglini).

Jean Lemaire de Belges is the subject of chapter 3, where a number of his works are seen as comments on the rhetoric of fabula. Thus the Judgment of Paris (following Ann Moss) presents the three goddesses not just as three ways of life, but as three very different kinds of style.

Chapter 4 pursues some of these themes in the mythographers Conti and Cartari and their French translators Du Verdier and Baudouin (Paris is guilty of succumbing to "le plaisir du texte" (189), and Hercules's choice is between substance and ornamentation). Chapter 5 makes provocative comparisons between mythography and emblems, including their rhetoric of monstrosity, while the Conclusion consists mainly of an extended analysis of Colonna's Hypnerotomachia, claiming that it combines medieval and Renaissance attitudes.

If this summary sounds a little disjointed, that's because the book as a whole gave me an impression of disjointedness, despite its attempt to focus discussion around a small number of myths (Arachne, Cadmus, the Judgment of Paris) treated by many different authors. I was exasperated not only by details of format (at least 51 minor misprints; accents on Jehan Thenaud and Menestrier; a plethora of unnecessary and repetitive footnotes), but by the cramming of too much material into each chapter, so that before one interesting point can be sufficiently developed we have already jumped to the next one. Also irritating are the frequent references to modern critics (Jakobson, Foucault, Barthes, Kritzman, Derrida, Bloom), who often seem to be dragged in by the short hairs to support a claim that needs no supporting. Bloom is perhaps the most central to Campangne's argument, but does the Arachne myth really nourish "une veritable angoisse chez certains mythographes" (71)? I am suspicious of projections of modern anguish back onto the sixteenth century.

It is unfortunate that this very impressive dissertation was not more carefully reworked into a book which could have been easily readable as well as instructive, but it will certainly be of interest to all scholars working with Renaissance poetry and rhetoric.

BARBARA C. BOWEN Vanderbilt University