Pre-histoires II: Langues etrangeres et troubles economiques au XVIe siecle. .

Terence Cave. Pre-histoires II: Langues etrangeres et troubles economiques au [XVI.sup.e] siecle.

Geneva: Librairie Droz S. A., 2001. 216 pp. [euro]36.76. ISBN: 2-600-00627-3.

In 1999, Terence Cave, the great Oxford scholar of French Renaissance literature, published a much-acclaimed study entitled Pre-histoires: textes troubles au seuil de la modernite. The term "pre-histoire" there did not mean "prehistory" but stood for "early modern history of Western culture" ("pre-moderne" is often used these days as the equivalent of "early modern"). In clear contrast with Michel Foucault's theory of epistemic breaks, Cave identified a number of textual markings which revealed no single turning point but often ambiguous "traces" of change in historical consciousness. Two years later, a second volume comes out of the same press, with a more specific subtitle, putting the stress on linguistic (pt. 1) and economic (pt. 2) issues of the period.

The goal and methodology of these two companion books remain essentially the same. Cave invites his reader to reexamine sixteenth-century (mostly French) canonical literature in the light of a dramatically changing reality. In this second volume, the focus is put squarely on Rabelais' fiction, although a number of handbooks, manuals, and treatises are brought in to illuminate specific issues, breaking down tight walls, establishing mediations, and displacing conventional paradigms of cultural history.

Part 1 is devoted to the question of linguistic consciousness: to what extent can some key passages of Rabelais' fiction help us understand how foreign tongues were conceptualized in his days? To provide a set of possible answers to this question, Cave compares and contrasts examples of polyglorist farcical fictions (Pathelin and Pantagruel) as well as pedagogical treatises (John Palsgrave, Gabriel Meunier, or Gerard DuVivier). One thing is certain: French is given privileged status as a "natural tongue" replacing the lost language of origins. Yet, Rabelais recognizes other vernaculars as well, worships Latin, and writes against Ciceronian propaganda. In contrast with Bakhtin's model, he gropes for a "cultural mediation" between high and low cultures, and exhibits a fascinating mixture of rival, polyphonic voices (100).

Part 2, on the other hand, concentrates on how major economic and financial changes of the period surface, mostly in ambiguous ways, in Rabelais' four authentic fictional books. The widely-felt anxiety about inflationary trends ("encherissement"), due to the expansion of world trade and American gold imports, finds its way to the Third and Fourth Books of Pantagruel. Cave is well-read in contemporary debates about the virtue and corruption of commerce. Henri Estienne's encomium of the Frankfurt Fair and Jean Bodin's "realist" response to Malestroit's "nominalist" price theory shed light on the theme of waste and its corrupting effect. Rabelais' famous Praise of Debtors is reexamined in the light of other non-fictional works like Charles Du Moulin's Tractatus commerciorum et usurarum, also published in 1546. Old scholastic arguments against interest-bearing loans remain active, but they are challenged by a new concept of profitability in which modern economics is strangely mixed with ethical issues. Evangelic al caritas must prevail, and Panurge would certainly be condemned by Du Moulin as he dilapidates his possessions. But Rabelais' conservative stand is undermined by his own cheerful parody of unscrupulous and unrepentant hoarders. The same paradoxical ambiguity could be observed in the sheep merchant episode in Rabelais' Quart Livre, or in later texts like Ronsard's "Hymne de l'Or" or Montaigne's essay "Of Coaches." Double standards abound in a period precisely characterized as a threshold for modernity. Natalie Zemon Davis found similar problems in her recent study The Gift in XVIth-Century France (Oxford UP, 2000). Ascribing a definite historical sense to the linguistic or economic consciousness of Renaissance writers is a tricky business, but Cave approaches this problem with consummate caution, modesty, and tact. "Ces remarques doivent rester conjecturales," he confides near the end of his book (184). Many of these analyses and "conjectures" are persuasive enough to sway the reader. At the same time, Cave' s own Montaignian skepticism will invite other interpretations as one cheerfully crosses the numerous, ever changing, never unproblematic "thresholds of modernity."