La droite imposition des noms (De recta nominum impositione) (review)

With the release of this book, the team responsible for producing the complete edition of Pontus de Tyard's Œuvres presents to the public the last literary contribution of this multifaceted humanist, simultaneously embodying the poet, the philosopher and the theologian. The reader discovers here the result of Tyard's philological works published in 1603 in Lyon and never reedited; the importance of the present work, for this very reason, being undoubtedly legitimized.

In this book, which is composed of three parts — De recta nominum impositione, Librum Philonis Judaei de transnominatis annotationes, Librum Philonis Judaei Allegoricae sacrae — Tyard studies the question of naming, so central to the Renaissance: a question that is at the center of the philosophy of language in its relation between the thing (res) and the word (verbum). His study is the focus of a bilingual edition (Latin-French) translated by Jean Céard, with an introduction by Jean-Claude Margolin. This work by Tyard could not have been better served, when one takes into account the richness of Céard and Margolin's scholarship and rigor. It was upon Margolin to take on the heavy task of situating the philological research of Tyard in the history of Western thought. In his long introduction, Margolin shows that the philological research undertaken by Tyard around 1590, and which led to the book of 1603, pursues his previous philological preoccupations and returns to and contradicts known hyphotheses since Antiquity on the notion of naming.

His work, written in Latin, and scattered with words in French, Greek, and Hebrew, constitutes, in fact, a critical analysis of a series of both proper and common nouns. His execution seems unrestrained, a mixture of theoretical, etymological considerations, and a multiplicity of examples taken from a variety of areas (biblical characters, etymology, names of gods, of men and women, and so on). What dominates here is the variety which complements the central inquiry: the creation or the primordial origin of nouns. Tyard asks: is the origin of nouns the result of chance or of social, human convention? We rediscover here the questions that philosophers and linguists have been asking themselves since Plato's Cratylus. Margolin demonstrates that Tyard adheres to a "relative cratylism" (xxxiv) refined by "the artificialism of Hermogenes" (xlvii). The multiplicity of the authorities invoked by Tyard is still useful to his thought, feeding its critical dimensions. Apart from Plato, the Bible, and Philon d'Alexandrie, which constitute the three foundations of the commentary in the De recta nominum impositione, Tyard calls on a vertiginous array of sources, and which Margolin examines with precision. From antique writers (poets, historians, and philosophers) to those of the Renaissance (of which the decisive Léon L'Hébreu), and passing by the Pères de l'Église (Clément d'Alexandrie, Basile, and Eusèbe de Césarée, Jean Damascène, to cite but a few) and the medieval encyclopedists, Margolin lists the ensemble of writers cited by Tyard over the course of his scholarly endeavors, of which the digressions and the learned familiarity evoke Politien's Miscellanea and Eramus's Adages.

What is taken from a reading of the De recta nominum impositione is ultimately the intermediary position occupied by Tyard which, in rejecting all dogmatism, adopts a measured stance between cratylism on one side, and those who support the idea of the arbitrariness of language, on the other.

This critical edition, comprising a loyal translation to the original, as well as abundant notes, a bibliography, and an index nominum, offers precise documentation to the curious reader who wonders which place the origin and the motivation of the linguistic sign occupied in the mind of a humanist and the end of the sixteenth century.