Representations of the Body in French Renaissance Poetry. (Reviews).

Karen R. Sorsby, Representations of the Body in French Renaissance Poetry New York: Peter Lang, 1999. 136 pp. $40.95. ISBN 0-8204-4267-4.

Karen Sorsby sets out in this volume to explore the representation of the body by sixteenth-century French poets, particularly those who employ new models borrowed from art, medicine and religion. For Sorsby, the image of the body constantly evolves throughout the sixteenth century, reflecting both a reorganization of medieval anatomical theories and an increasing awareness of the symbolic significance of the body in relation to scientific development. The interrelated phenomena of the deffence et illustration of the French language and the desire for self-knowledge through contemplation of the body subtend the analysis of the body's different depictions within the themes of creation and anatomy, health and disease, religion, and beauty.

Sorsby first examines the body as microcosm in three Creation poets (Maurice Sceve, Guillaume du Bartas and Theodore d'Aubigne). While Sceve's metaphysics and du Bartas' cosmography both portray metaphorical visions of the body, the latter incorporates more anatomical material from contemporary scientific discourse. D'Aubigne's La Creation, the most anatomically exhaustive of the three, is also the most preoccupied with the body as a vessel for the soul, which cannot be "reduyz au dedans d'une espace." Sorsby notes that painting, architecture and sculpture form a bridge between the concrete and the abstract in d'Aubigne's depiction of the body and the soul.

Turning to poet-physicians, Sorsby shows that while Francois Beroalde de Verville presents the Creation as an alchemical transmutation, Joseph du Chesne vilifies the substance of the body by expounding on its corruption after the Adamic Fall. Graphic depictions of a dissection of the spleen, replete with words describing decay and stench, contribute to du Chesne's moralizing designs.

Sorsby concludes that these poets reflect changes in societal values during the Renaissance, since they begin to view the human body as a cultural reality to be constantly reinterpreted.

Following a brief examination of malady, humoral theory and what she terms "stylized melancholy" in du Bellay's Les Regrets, Sorsby arrives at her most probing analysis, that of "Christian physiology" in the polemical religious poetry of d'Aubigne and Ronsard. Juxtaposing d'Aubigne's concept of the Protestant body as a matrix for representing martyrdom and Ronsard's image of the battered body of France symbolizing the Catholic state, Sorsby shows the antithetical textual attempts to authenticate or to repudiate those bodies. Another use of the body for religious and polemic purposes is d'Aubigne's depiction in Princes of Henry III as an atheist, hermaphroditic sodomite, which serves to distort the king's Catholic identity. Each poet ultimately celebrates his own self-image while condemning the alien nature of the other by deprecating the metaphorical body representing it.

"The body" almost inevitably signifies "the male body" in these Renaissance depictions, and, as Sorsby points out, the references to the woman's physical qualities often transmogrify into denigrations of women's social identity, especially in d'Aubigne. However, one woman's depiction of the body (both male and female) is briefly glimpsed in a section on the aesthetics of the body in Louise Labe, who contemplates the male body by relating imagination to visual experience and who attempts to redefine the standards of Petrarchan beauty.

Sorsby aptly notes that poetry, because of its ability to inspire and delight the reader, creates a more powerful image of the body than does scientific discourse. Given this convincing claim, it is surprising that little attention is accorded to lyric poetry (the lover's body, lyric subjectivity and the gendered body). It seems to this reviewer that an acknowledgment of some of the important critical work on the body during the 1990s would significantly enrich the author's treatment of beauty and the female subject or object. The difficult questions raised in recent work by such critics as Deborah Lesko Baker, Gisele Mathieu-Castellani, and Nancy Vickers, authors who are nowhere cited, could complicate and at the same time help to refine the study. More meticulous editing in a number of instances in the text would also be welcome.

If the limitations noted above may engender divided responses from some scholarly readers, Sorsby's book serves nonetheless as an informative overview of several compelling questions and problems within the representation of the body in French Renaissance poetry. Its accessibility to undergraduates and its firm grounding in sixteenth-century texts make it a potentially valuable tool for those who are encountering these questions for the first time.