Poetices libri septem. Sieben Bucher uber die Dichtkunst.

These first volumes of a projected five-volume labor of love testify to a continued growing interest in European humanism. Coming at the same time as Droz's French edition of the Poetics' fifth book, the present immense edition and German translation of Julius Caesar Scaliger's favorite work suggests that reevaluation of such major figures of the next generation as Carlo Sigonio, Christopher Clavius, J.J. Scaliger, and others is quickly extending to that of their immediate predecessors. As a result, scholars reconfigure the European "Renaissance" to grasp continuities rather than urge ruptures, to explore the fine intricacies of collective uses of the past rather than assert the dewy originalities of a unique new establishment. The worthy effect of such work will be a revised understanding of a singular era in European history and solid scepticism of its supposedly virulent - and so "illegitimate" - disruption of "normal" processes of civilization. Too many scholars have offered simplistic and intrinsically incomprehensible claims that the sudden irruption of an instrumentally rational self henceforth pitted a diseased Europe against all other "healthy" cultures. As more of the age's works become available in fine editions and translations we shall see that matters are altogether more complicated.

Scaliger's Poetics unquestionably ranks as among the most important of these works, although its public beginnings were not auspicious. First, Jean de Maumont erroneously sent the manuscript back to his author friend, who had intended him to find a printer. So much time then passed without word from Scaliger that de Maumont feared the manuscript's loss. Next, when Scaliger asked him to try again, de Maumont chose Charles Estienne, whose eventual judgment, the middleman opined in a letter that did not mince words (cited here at length), must have been affected by over-indulgence in lunchtime wine. As Luc Dietz sums it up, Estienne berated the work's "wretched organization, verbosity, deficient style, suspect religious views," and more. It was, "in short, an unneeded volume that would bring its publisher no profit and its author no glory" (xiv). Following this judgment, Scaliger requested that de Maumont return the manuscript once again. Just a month before his death (21 October 1558), he dictated a despairing letter to his eldest son, Joseph Justus. Unable to work any further, and afraid for the safe future of his cherished magnum opus, he asked that it be sent to Robert Constantin in Lyon.

There, Scaliger and Constantin had another close friend in the publisher and bookdealer Antoine Vincent, who obtained a privilege to publish in early September 1560 (Constantin himself got the rights seven months later to an annotated edition of this and other works of Scaliger). The book appeared in 1561 in two printings: one by Vincent and the Genevan Jean Crespin (varying only by title page), and the second by Vincent with minor changes. Neither version indicated place of publication; nor did Petrus Santandreanus' second, third and fourth editions of 1581, 1586, and 1594. But Estienne had missed his mark: the Poetics became celebrated and profitable (xx).

Pierre de St. Andre's name leads Luc Dietz to lush pastures. In 1560, the printer's mother Antoinette Commelin, widow of Calvinist minister Jean de St. Andre, married bookdealer-editor Antoine Calvin, the reformer's brother. Antoine, a member of Crespin's most intimate circle, was "the most productive - one might almost be inclined to say most militant - of Genevan printers in the 1560s" (xxii). Crespin therefore must have known Antoinette. When Jean Calvin died in 1564 all his papers were left to his brother, who died nine years' later, leaving them to his twelve-year-old son. Dietz speculates, not implausibly, that Antoinette then persuaded her cousin, the editor-publisher, Jerome Commelin, to come to Geneva to work with these papers and help her oldest son (then eighteen) by putting his name alone on some title pages. Jerome worked in Geneva for thirteen years, publishing works of Antiquity and Reform, before moving with his family to Calvinist Heidelberg in 1587, where they died of the plague ten years later.

The second and third editions were therefore Genevan. Dietz argues that the many errors in the fourth edition make it certain that it was overseen neither by Jerome nor by his corrector-editor, the "brilliant scholar" Friedrich Sylburg - especially since by 1594 the former had been corresponding for years with J.J. Scaliger, who advised him on textual questions. Rather than in Heidelberg, it, too then, was published in Geneva. All these connections to Genevan Reform bring us back to the first edition.

The Jesuit Antonio Possevino, in his famed 1593 Bibliotheca, asserted that Crespin brought it out in Geneva, misusing Vincent's name in order to get the rights (xxiv, n. 22). But Vincent in fact lived there from 1559 to 1564. He took a major part in publishing the Calvinist psalter and was deeply involved with Crespin's firm. As a bourgeois de Lyon, he was able to bring out in France books actually printed in Geneva. From these sales, he co-financed (and profited by) "new and potentially lucrative Crespin editions" (xxv). It was also with Crespin that in April 1559, six months after Scaliger's death, the executor of his manuscripts, Constantin, negotiated for an edition of his own Greek-Latin lexicon - which appeared three years later. Crespin died in 1572, his firm disappearing with him. "Should we be surprised," Dietz writes, "if one of his closest friends, his guild colleague and co-religionist Antoine Calvin picked up Scaliger's ever more famous Poetics for his own publishing program?" (xxvxxvi). Since he died just a year later, it was his widow's cousin who carried that out.

Perhaps one should conclude nothing from this as to Scaliger's own doctrinal affiliations. He had been legally acquitted of heresy (xvi). Yet his views remained suspect. Possevino wanted him for the Catholics (against his own by-then more famous son), while the Genevans thought him theirs. That his publishers kept the city's name off the title page may indicate that they shared Estienne's view, preferring not to draw attention to matters other than those of poetics. In any case, they surely affected neither circulation, prestige, nor influence. Complete editions appeared in Heidelberg in 1607 and 1617, the first with many corrections and additions, perhaps by Joseph Scaliger and possibly from a now lost autograph - making it the only edition besides that of 1561 useful to establish the text.

By then, the Poetics had long been a major quarry and foil for other writers on its topics, an "almost encyclopedic Summa" avowed then (and now) as "the sixteenth-century's most comprehensive treatise on poetic doctrine" (xxxii). On its towering or exiguous influence platitudes have been rife, and evidence scanted either way. Dietz gives the necessarily sketchy outline of a study that would show its hold to have varied much by time and place (xxxvi-lxiii). The English seem to have responded earliest, but used the work more for prestige reference than for principled debate, including Sidney's well-known remarks (though Chapman's vehement criticism is not mentioned). In German lands, the Poetics was not much cited before the end of the century, when from Jacobus Pontanus and Michael Praetorius to Martin Opitz above all, it became a fount of judgments and ideas. Yet even as he acknowledges the huge effect of Opitz's work, Dietz (as is his wont) disparages Scaliger's role by arguing that Opitz may not have read him. But if Scaligerian dogmas were memorized by rote, if such memories were used from esteem (rather than intrinsic need), if his name had become a ready passe partout and the Poetics an unread source of citations, these testify to the influence being belittled - as do the gottlichen Scaliger topos common in the mid-seventeenth century (xlvi) and the textbooks Dietz supposes (xli, xlvii).

In 1730, Gottschied still used material from Scaliger, while even forty years later Lessing thought mockery worthwhile. As one might suppose, the Dutch afterlife was briefer, with Vossius, Heinsius and Vondel knowing his work well, but in France debate still rages about Scaliger's relation as much to the Pleiade as to Classicism. As always, Dietz advances evidence of Scaliger's presence with one hand only to remove it with the other (the number of trotz, gleichwohl, dennoch, dessenungeachtet throughout is startling). Its influence in Italy, Spain, and Portugal was hardly significant. As interesting perhaps, although Dietz does not mention it, is the fact that the Poetics seems to have been used in Polish and Ukrainian schools far into the nineteenth century.

Scaliger's reputation remains vast. Dietz fears it a case of "the more praised, the less read." Reference to the Poetics, he suggests, usually worked to flatter an author's vanity or emphasize a reader's ignorance. When more solid, it was of narrow import and most often drawn from the first book or two chapters of the third. Some of the best-known doctrines ascribed to Scaliger are actually interpreters' misunderstandings. No one has yet undertaken the hard job of setting the work as a whole in a history of European though by sorting out direct influence (of word or content) from indirect echo or backreading (lxii-lxiii). Dietz's scepticism means to urge this undertaking, his and Vogt-Spira's edition to make it possible.

And the edition is itself a formidable venture that one hopes will indeed make the Poetics "accessible" (zuganglich, ix). But at volume prices of about $275, the combined total of some $1400 may be prohibitive even for libraries. One must urge the contrary, for apart from their translation, these five volumes will also be the first ever critical edition of the work. Here we note the first three volumes, comprising, besides the general introduction on which I have been drawing, the index of the entire work, the first four books, and introductions discussing and contextualizing the matter of each.

The first book offers a 57-chapter "history" of poetry drawn wholly from ancient sources (moderns will be discussed only in VI. 4). Its ground is a theory of three modes of being (the necessary, the useful, and the pleasing), their corresponding agents (soldier, politician, citizen), forms of expressive thought (philosophical, political, pleasant), and skills (philosophy, rhetoric, narration-perhaps better called art of the fictive imagination). To situate poetry - narration, the fictive imagination - in the realm of the "citizen" was to continue Aristotle's reply to Plato. But it also foreshadows a time not far off when poetry would lose its courtly focus and become more thoroughgoingly the "citizen's" activity as "literature," when, in France for example, Richelieu would put its conduct and purpose in the hands of the bourgeois scholars of the Academie Francaise. Here, too, the "bourgeois" Genevan connection may bear unexpected weight. This first book explores the origins of poetry, nature of the poet, and poetic genres (with pastoral as the oldest and giving most place to tragedy, comedy, and other public dramatic forms) on the basis of a theory of causes whose final is imitatio and learning (doctio) by imitatio. Fictive imitation gives pleasure, but always in the service of doctio.

The second book treats of poetry's material causes, discussing the various forms of versification, metre, and rhythm, as well as the kinds of effect poetry achieves and the ways in which it does so. With the third, we reach formal causes. Scaliger effectively divides these into two parts. The first involves what we might call the logical art of poetry, and deals with ideas, argumentation, and their ordering and display. Chapters 1-94 of this book occupy this edition's second volume. They treat their matter, not unexpectedly, through categories drawn from Aristotle's Organon, elements taken from the Poetics (much inclined towards Horace), and figures from the Rhetoric. In the third volume are chapters 95-126, giving examples of how these work in some specific genres, starting with epic (95), emphasizing tragedy, comedy, mimus (96), and then running through satire, pastoral, and various "minor" genres, concluding with a chapter on the importance and implications of titles (126). It is altogether worth noting that Scaliger is most interested in discussing public poetic genres. Besides the chapter on drama, the longest treats epithalamia (100), but most of the others deal with praise genres. Lyric (123) and elegy (124) are dismissed in two of the shortest. Poetry, again, is the particular province of the citizen, pleasant learning in the service of the public good of civil life.

Book four (also in this edition's third volume), presents the second series of formal causes: what we may call the rhetorical art of poetry, the style, figures, and rhythm that make it persuasive. Scaliger calls the entire book Parasceve, and, it is indeed the last step in preparing the writer to write, and putting matter and form into the efficient hands of the poet. First, Scaliger explains at some length the three styles (high or magniloquent, unornamented or plain, middle or mediocre), their effects, uses, and means. The chapters that follow provide myriad learned examples of these, including those on the high style, in what is by far the longest chapter of the work (IV.16:3. 350-447). Two volumes of the edition remain to appear. Books 5 (vol. 4) and 6 (vol. 5) treat the efficient cause that is the poet by means of critical judgments. Book 7 adds a number of supplementary issues.

Here is of course not a place to explore Scaliger's Summa. But this will now be possible on the basis of a properly collated and annotated edition. That one feels urged to do so signals the work's power. Moreover, the justification for the Poetics' celebrity may now be well scrutinized and evaluated. This enormous edition's last volumes are announced as forthcoming. At the rate these three have followed one another, we can assume they will be before us shortly. One awaits them with such bated breath as scholarly artifacts can excite. The editors and publishers are to be congratulated on a set of superb volumes the pleasures of whose handling and reading match their sureness of scholarship.

TIMOTHY J. REISS New York University