Théologies poétiques de l'âge baroque: La Muse chrétienne (1570-1630) (review)

This is a book for scholars written by a scholar. Originally a thesis, Théologies poétiques de l'âge baroque offers all the accoutrements one looks forward to in the French doctorate: a detailed table of contents in clear outline form; generous and informative footnotes; and, most coveted by any researcher, an extensive listing of bibliographic reference works, period sources, and critical literature. It is difficult to separate in a brief review the many historical, theoretical, and polemical threads which interweave to create this text of more than 800 pages. But it is possible to pick out the colors of these recurring strands.

Bourgeois begins his work by anchoring it firmly to the critical tradition of the baroque. By the very title he gives to his study, he tells us about his approach to the material. Ordinarily referred to as devotional poetry or religious poetry, Bourgeois playfully rewrites the terms in such a way as to allude to his contentions and gives us "poetic theologies." It is a nod both to the notion of coinciding opposites fundamental to baroque theory, and to the complementary theoretical framework of intertextuality and rewriting which supports his text. The interpenetration of the poetic and the theological motivates his primary analysis. In the second part of his title, "l'âge baroque," one might hear an echo of the title of Marc Fumaroli's study of rhetoric, L'Age de l'éloquence (1980). However, Orpheus-like, Bourgeois calls back to a more distant name: La Littérature de l'âge baroque en France, by Jean Rousset (1953). He opens a lyrical introduction with a quotation from Rousset's L'Intérieur et l'extérieur (1968). Bourgeois intends to give new and legitimate life to certain aspects of the baroque, sometimes scorned as a literary classification. It is within the seriously playful, open nature of the baroque — which as he says, like a dream reconciles so many antitheses — that Bourgeois examines the apparent contradictions of devotional poetry. He will look particularly at the coming together of interior asceticism and spectacular language.

The imagined allusion to Fumaroli's study of rhetoric is not as ephemeral as one first thinks. The age of eloquence, the age of the power of rhetoric, and the baroque age are, in sum, one and the same. Especially in his concluding chapters, Bourgeois will differ with Fumaroli's evaluation of these devotional pieces. According to Bourgeois, Fumaroli would distinguish these works by their pungent gravity and tie them to a melancholy following the Wars of Religion and to the malaise of a waning century. Bourgeois would argue, too, that it is not enough to say that in the earlier seventeenth century a simpler, sublime, Attic style replaces the vehemence and ornament of a Ciceronian style. Bourgeois contends that this poetry flows from a principle of rewriting in a primary sense. Rewriting is, above all other means, the Christian mode of working with language and the revealed Word. The language of both Catholic and Protestant poets reformulates theological language.

When Bourgeois examines the rhetoric of the soul, he finds that the poetic celebration of the movements of the soul shows the rhetoric of this period to constitute an all-encompassing paradigm. The structures of this paradigm organize multiple exchanges between types of texts that are perceived as radically different today. Thus eloquence is the thought structure that allows a momentary triumph over the division into fields of knowledge and disciplines that is occurring in a more and more systematic manner. The emergence among the laity of a place for religious literature not tied to the Church leads one to believe that these poets, through what they describe as a necessary conversion of the Muses, are perhaps trying to preserve a unity of practices that literary society has already broken asunder. In this devotional poetry, sermon...