A Savage Mirror: Power, Identity, and Knowledge in Early Modern France (review)

Michael Wintroub's Savage Mirror: Power, Identity, and Knowledge in Early Modern France is presented as a history of "what Henry II's [1 October 1550] entry into Rouen was about" (8). With impressive knowledge and well-selected illustrations, the author explores this entry in a new way, "a meandering one through multivalent social and political contexts not normally seen as being connected" in order to bring "insight into the larger — i.e., global — dimensions of early modern French culture and society" (12). In its seemingly contradictory impulses and symbolism, Rouen's entry self-consciously expanded the political and poetic revolution that the Parisian royal entry had propagated the previous year. At the same time, it revealed the perceived failure in "correspondence between narrative values and ontologically necessary universal structures" (141) among mid-sixteenth-century courtiers, royal officials, humanists, and civic elites. Thus, this entry is anatomized to reveal a general crisis in French political thought and society.

Chapters 1 through 3 succinctly describe the traditional practices of the entry: (1) the clergy, officials, and groups of citizens' processions outside the city and before the enthroned king and (2) the king's and his entourage's viewing of spectacular tableaux on entering the city. Wintroub gives special attention to the innovative elements, particularly the appropriation of the ancient triumphal style with three chariots dramatizing more traditional tableaux vivants depicting Fame, Religion, and Happy Fortune. Actors on the last chariot personified the king in royal robes with Fortuna holding an imperial crown over him. When the king first started to enter the city, he encountered on an island in the Seine a display of 300 naked Brazilian Tupinamba and Tobejaro tribe members, fifty of whom were actual natives, in their natural setting and going about their daily life. Then they waged war, after which a French ship sank a Portuguese caravel. The natives and battles presented to Henry II the "savage mirror" that grew in narrative significance in the later spectacles of "The Grotto of Orpheus," Neptune offering his trident, and Saturn on an "Arch of the Golden Age." Finally, Henry's gaze is directed to three theaters devoted to Hector, the Cross, and the Elysian fields. In the last, François I shared heroic eternity with Hercules. The entry concluded at the Church of Notre Dame of Rouen.

Each pageant had specific messages. As a creation of the new mercantile wealthy of Rouen, the island drama sought to impress the king with the importance of the Brazilian trade and initiated the entry's larger motifs of savagery and natural humanity, civilization and learning, ideal kingship and perfected human society. In its totality, "Henry's ceremonial itinerary from the perfect warriors represented by the Brazilians to an ideal of humanist civilité represented by the apotheosis of François I, was mirrored by a movement from the chivalric-military ideals characteristic of France's old feudal nobility to the Ciceronian-humanist values of its new civic-cultural elite" (60). The presentations abounded in "mediated ambiguities" between the exotica of the New World and new ways of thinking about French culture. Wintroub's descriptive analysis of the entry program follows with five more chapters and a coda to explicate the "complex semiotic structure" of the entry program which represented both an ideological voyage and a quest for unity constructed in the disguised tensions between discarded old traditions and newly constructed ones. One major group in the entry production that illustrated this tension was the poetic society called the Puy de Palinode. It had traditionally been dedicated to composing poetry celebrating the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary, but whose members now found themselves in a cultural struggle that separated the value of poetry from that of religion. For the entry, its major poets had embraced a "specific ideal of culture and civilization" (89) that made interchangeable ideals of an apocalyptical New Jerusalem without...