Se dire a la Renaissance: Les Momoires au XVIe siecle.

Nadine Kuperty-Tsur, (De Petrarque a Descartes, 65). Paris: Vrin, 1997. 223 pp. FF 198. ISBN: 2-7116-1326-7.

Sixteenth-century French memoirs, I had always thought, were essentially boring, and useful only for the occasional retrieval of historical information. This revised French dissertation has convinced me that as a hybrid but recognizable genre they share both compositional strategies and mental attitudes, can illustrate the changing concepts of selfhood which fascinate modern critics, and are altogether well worth reading.

Kuperty-Tsur's introduction and first chapter document the relative neglect and misunderstanding of memoirs from Commynes to d'Aubigne, especially by nineteenth-century critics who were uncomfortable with their preoccupation with personality, and state the conventions of the new genre as she sees them: interaction of personal and historical narrative and of private time and official time, debt to a variety of previous models including the royal biography, the Mirror of Princes, and St. Augustine's Confessions, and the basic strategy of a plaidoyer or demonstrative legal oration. In all cases, the organizing principle is personal discourse, usually but not invariably via first-person narration.

There is considerable difference between Protestant and Catholic memoirs (d'Aubigne versus Charlotte Duplessis-Mornay), but little or none between men and women writers. The memoirs discussed include those of De Thou (the only author writing in Latin), Marguerite de Valois, Tavannes, Jeanne d'Albret, Cheverny, the Duc de Bouillon, Henri de Mesmes, the Duc d'Angouleme, Saint-Auban and the Du Bellay brothers.

Chapter 2 discusses Renaissance concepts of selfhood, claiming that the Renaissance meeting of Christian and Classical notions of the individual freed autobiography from the constraints of confession. The new emphasis on virtus rather than Fortune, and on the dignity of man, is also relevant to memoirs, and the chapter includes an instructive comparison between memoirs as a genre and the Essais of Montaigne. Chapter 3 analyzes the strategy of memoir prefaces, which indicate the desired reading public (family, or the great, or future historians), stress simple and unadorned style (most Memorialists are old soldiers who despise letters), and imply the curious paradox that subjectivity of viewpoint in some way guarantees objectivity of narrative (106).

The following four chapters trace the successive stages of memoir narrative: accounts of childhood (4), early successes (5), subsequent disgrace (6), and closing strategies (7). Disgrace is central; childhood is important only as a pointer to the exceptional qualities of the adult, and successes only by dramatic contrast with the disaster to follow. Disgrace is usually depicted as so unjust that it elevates the victim to the status of martyr.

The book also has a brief conclusion, very useful "Notices Biographiques," a contemporary portrait of Villeroy, and some manuscript pages from Charlotte Duplessis-Mornay. My dry summary has not done justice to Kuperty-Tsur's erudition, judicious choice of quotations from many different authors, and sensible discussion of controversial subjects like the transition from medieval to Renaissance concepts of the individual. This is a useful and attractive book.

BARBARA C. BOWEN Vanderbilt University