The Iconography of Power: The French "Nouvelle" at the End of the Middle Ages & Reading in the Renaissance: "Amadis tie Gaule "and the Lessons of Memory.

David Laguardia, The Iconography of Power: The French "Nouvelle" at the End of the Middle Ages

Newark and London: University of Delaware Press, 1999. 178 pp. ISBN 0-87413-669-5.

Marian Rothstein, Reading in the Renaissance: "Amadis tie Gaule "and the Lessons of Memory

Newark and London: University of Delaware Press, 1999. 193 pp. ISBN 0-87413-668-7.

Two books on French narrative in the sixteenth century were published by the University of Delaware Press in 1999. David Laguardia's The Iconography of Power treats the French "nouvelle" at the end of the Middle Ages; while Marian Roth-stein's Reading in the Renaissance is a reception-oriented study of the Amadis de Gaule. While both books treat the evolution of a genre of narrative fiction from the fifteenth to the sixteenth century, the techniques used to study these genres are as different as the literary forms themselves.

David Laguardia studies three collections of "nouvelles": the anonymous mid-fifteenth-century collection entitled Les cent nouvelles nouvelles, Philippe de Vigneulles' early sixteenth-century book of the same name, and finally Marguerite de Navarre's better-known Heptameron (begun 1546). Laguardia's thesis is that each author is concerned with power (in a Foucauldian sense) of some kind, and that this concern generates the structures and themes of the books. The first of the three is concerned with male "homosocial" power relations, despite the fact that most of the tales involve triangular scenarios of cuckoldry. The second collection also portrays cuckoldry, but now Laguardia sees economic rather than sexual exchange as the crux of Vigneulles's definition of power. Finally, the Heptameron is seen to play out issues of gender, as women struggle to out-wit men, and to avoid the seduction which was the common currency of the two earlier collections.

Running throughout the volume is Laguardia's contention, explained in chapter 1, that the "nouvelle" is not a realistic genre, despite the claims of most nineteenth and twentieth-century critics, who saw realism as the saving grace of the nouvelle, otherwise found to be crude, vulgar and not really worthy of serious study. Laguardia, on the other hand, views the structure of the nouvelle as iconographic, in the sense that it pits characters against each other in stereotypical and symbolic ways, which most readers recognize as much more conventional than realistic.

Laguardia makes use of psycho-analytic, Marxist, and feminist approaches, which he defends as illuminating despite their anachronism in the early modern period. All in all this book provides a fresh way to look at the development of the nouvelle from mid-fifteenth to mid-sixteenth century, and links this subversive genre to a variety of social revolutions taking place in the early modern period.

Marian Rothstein's Reading in the Renaissance is a very different sort of book, despite some superficial similarities. Her study is essentially reception-oriented, and so does not really treat issues of power in the novel, or if so, it is the power of the reader which emerges here. While Laguardia saw a change over time in the social commentary provided by the nouvelle, Rothstein sees a change in the readership of the Amadis, from the mid to late sixteenth century. Among the most original techniques of her book are its analysis of woodcuts as a revelation of "printer as reader," her interest in translation as a form of reading, and her emphasis on the demands which a long novel like the Amadis made on readers' memory.

Rothstein's volume is divided into chapters by aesthetic or poetic questions, rather than simply going through the Amadis book by book. Chapter 1 situates the genre of the prose romance in relation to classical and Renaissance epic (particularly that of Ariosto). Chapter 2 explains the value French Renaissance readers placed on the Amadis, which Rothstein documents ingeniously through discussions of format, language, exemplarity, patriotism, etc. Chapter 3, "The Poetics of the Novel" is central to Rothstein's thesis that the novel, by its very structure, drew readers in, forcing them to use memory, to recognize analogies, and thus to be active readers. Some original concepts such as "recombinatory reading" and "interlaced plot" are explained here.

Chapters 4 and 5 focus more and more on attempts to define the real reader of the Amadis, and to see the problems posed for this reader in the changing world of the sixteenth century. Chapter 4 finds that, as successive volumes of the Amadis appear over time (both by Herberay and by later continuers), more and more complex demands are made on the reader. This chapter documents who real readers may have been, through analysis of successive editions, and of dedications to a noble, knightly class (a major difference from the implied readership of the nouvelle, more usually conceived of as bourgeois).

The final chapter explains the decline in popularity of the Amadis, at the end of the sixteenth century, by focusing on two major socio-historical changes. The two main subjects of the Amadis were love and war, which both underwent a major re-evaluation during the period studied by Rothstein. She blends historical and literary testimony to show how clandestine marriage, once a staple of the romance genre, was condemned by Protestants and also by the Council of Trent. Secondly, warfare changed dramatically during the period of the Wars of Religion, so that not only was single knightly combat no longer the norm, but also the value of war itself was called into question, as France was plunged into bloodshed and forced to confront the reality of what had been presented as a fantasy, in the romance genre. The book concludes with the original insight that the very active reading which the Amadis served to develop now caused readers to question the relevance of the novel to their changed situation in the late sixte enth-century.

Both books have solid notes and bibliography. Rothstein in particular has consulted an extensive range of sixteenth-century primary texts, including many more than the Amadis itself. In fact her bibliography provides a valuable list of fifteenth and sixteenth-century French fiction (including translations). The list of other works consulted is likewise superb, ranging from works on the visual arts, to translation, to chivalry, to name only a few.

French Renaissance scholars should be very grateful to the University of Delaware Press for having produced these two fine volumes, as well as a series of other studies on Renaissance literature in general, in the past few years.