The Dialogue in Early Modern France, 1547-1630: Art and Argument.

If one were to point to a single cultural form that most clearly shows our historical distance from the Renaissance, that form would surely be the dialogue. Our own moment is fascinated with notions of the dialogic, from Bakhtin's famous analyses of the discourse of the novel, to Habermas's exploration of the relationship between dialogue and interest. And certainly the dialogue is ubiquitous in Renaissance culture; indeed, it may be said to be the humanist genre par excellence. Yet the genre of dialogue remains one of the most alien and difficult for modern readers. This learned and thoughtful collection on the dialogue in the French Renaissance should open new perspectives on the form. It extends the best recent work on dialogue to new contexts and raises a series of pertinent questions about the relationship between rhetoric, power, and literary form.

Art and Argument is divided into two sections - concerned, respectively, with theory and practice. The first section consists of a long essay by Donald Gilman dealing with both the theory of dialogue in the sixteenth century and recent critical trends. Gilman explains attempts by Renaissance theorists to conceptualize the hybrid genre of dialogue and to locate it in scholastic, Platonic, and Ciceronian traditions. His discussion is chiefly concerned with Le Caron, Sigonius, and Tasso, whom he singles out as the three most influential contributors to the theory of dialogue. Gilman offers a useful overview of debates about the genre, connecting them to a variety of strands in humanist thought. His piece offers an excellent starting point for anyone interested in reading dialogues.

The second half of the book consists of a series of essays about specific writers of dialogue in Renaissance France. All are interesting. Colette Winn analyzes the use of dialogue in Marguerite de Navarre's Heptameron and Navire. She shows how the two texts provide different forms of reconciliation between conflicting voices. She has especially good things to say about how the frame dialogue of the Heptameron undermines language and communication altogether. Joan A. Buhlmann follows Winn's close formal analysis with an overview of Louis Le Caron's vast corpus of dialogic writings. Buhlmann explores the relations between Le Caron and various other intellectual movements of the day. She succeeds in claiming a place for Le Caron as an influential contributor to and synthesizer of French intellectual life during the period.

Cathy Yandell's essay on Jacques Tahureau marks the turning point in the collection, since it takes us from analyses that stress intellectual exchange and reconciliation to an attention to power and literary authority. Yandell shows how Tahureau's Dialogues (1565) engage in a rhetoric of authority while pretending to set forth a variety of opinions. Dialogue turns out to be a kind of allegory of authorial identity. This "dialogic" mode of dialogue is seen to be at work in even more surprising ways in the work of the feminist writer Catherine des Roches, which is analyzed by Ann Rosalind Jones. Jones shows how des Roches uses the dialogue's formal impulse to "ventriloquism" to stage a difficult struggle for gender domination. This shift toward a more conflictual reading of dialogue is continued in the final essay of the volume, Paula Sommers's piece on Agrippa d'Aubigne. In d'Aubigne, the humanist form of the dialogue mutates to reflect concern with the nature of reality and illusion. The humanist exploration of the relationship of language and truth gives way, in the proto-novelistic Les Avantures du Baron de Faeneste, to social satire and a mixture of conflicting genres. Dialogue becomes one more piece in a "dialogic" text. The collection concludes with a gloss on the various essays by Eva Kushner.

This is a useful and authoritative collection that suggests both the richness and importance of the dialogue as a major form of cultural expression in the French Renaissance.

TIMOTHY HAMPTON University of California, Berkeley