Les Serées (1584–1597–1598) du librarie-imprimeur Guillaume Bouchet (1514–1594) (review)

Guillaume Bouchet was a prominent book dealer, printer, and writer active in late sixteenth-century Poitiers. He is remembered primarily in today's academic circles as the author of Les Serées, a collection of thirty-six after-dinner dialogues, published, republished, and widely circulated over the course of some fifty years between 1584 and 1634. By the mid-seventeenth century, Bouchet's literary destiny seems to have declined noticeably, although there are signs of continuing reader interest in later eras. Modern literary historians have examined various aspects of Les Serées, including the work's narrative framework, its literary antecedents, and the presence of social and cultural commentary within its pages. However, that the Frenchman borrowed extensively from other writers, piecing together numerous and sometimes lengthy passages from multiple sources, has prompted many of his critics to dismiss him as a second-rate author and a mere compiler of heterogeneous material.

As André Janier argues in his meticulous and lengthy study of Les Serées, Bouchet appears to have composed each chapter with the help of thematically arranged commonplace books in which he recorded the fruit of his diverse readings. Hence, the Frenchman's eclectic writing resembles on occasion that of other French Renaissance authors such as François Rabelais or Michel de Montaigne, albeit less inspired. Each narrative in Bouchet's repertoire bears a thematic title — "On Wine," "On Water," "On Women and Girls," and so on — and each is laced with historical tidbits, noteworthy opinions, and proverbial wisdoms derived from a wide assortment of primary and secondary sources. Some chapters, such as the fourteenth and nineteenth serées, contain as many as ninety borrowings. Janier's annotated list of identifiable source material is extensive and includes Old and New Testament authors; Greek, Latin, and Christian classics; and a host of modern French writers ranging from Guillaume Budé, Laurent Joubert, and Jean Bodin to Bonaventure des Périers, François de Belleforest, and Estienne Pasquier. As Janier discovers, however, Bouchet often quotes his authorities — Aristotle, Plato, Thales, Strabo, Plautus, Lactantius — from secondary sources and withholds the names of those whose works he actually consulted or, in some instances, outright "pillaged" (Janier's expression). To those who would condemn such a practice as intellectual theft, Bouchet responds through his narrator that "all good things are common goods" and should be shared freely once they have been made public. Janier sees in this attitude a sign of the author's lingering attachment to the values of oral culture in the age of printing.

Beyond the delicate question of textual borrowings, one of the principal difficulties critics have encountered in discussing Les Serées lay in their formal classification as a subgenre. Are they dialogues, nouvelles, essays, or perhaps something in between? Janier believes they are best described as "sundry discussions" (discours bigarrés), a linguistically diverse short-form narrative practiced in the late sixteenth century by writers such as Étienne Tabourot (Les Bigarrures, 1572), Nicolas de Cholières (Les Matinées, 1585), and Noël du Fail (Contes et discours d'Eutrapel, 1585). Variety is an essential ingredient in the discours bigarrés, and it is a fundamental feature in Les Serées. Bouchet's after-dinner conversations not only combine opinions from diverse and sometimes conflicting sources, but they are also linguistically rich and include elements of poetry, word play, hieroglyphs, quips, proverbs, fables, anecdotes, prodigious tales, chronicles, passages from scientific and medical literature, and nouvelles.

Intended to satisfy a reader's boundless curiosity, the work's protean abundance of topics and narrative voices retains, in Janier's view, remarkable coherence. Each conversation has a familiar decor, and each has a similar narrative format. Transitions from one topic to the next appear deliberate and organized. Division of the thirty-six...