Nature et paysages: L'émergence d'une nouvelle subjectivité à la Renaissance (review)

For the last fifty years or so, a steadily increasing interest has developed in the study of the so-called "emergence of a new subjectivity" in the early modern period. Although the word subjectivity has been used with somewhat different meanings by scholars ranging from Blumenberg to Garin, Greenblatt, Taylor, and Toulmin, the representation of landscapes has generally been a major field of inquiry in the assessment of the period's psychologizing tendencies. Starting with Petrarch's "Ascent of Mont Ventoux," there has been a number of important studies on the subject (see Karlheinz Stierle's Petrarcas Landschaften: zur Geschichte ästhetischer Landschaftserfahrung [1979]). Indeed Renaissance landscapes lend themselves particularly well to the study of symbolic projections of the poetic self, and a study of their configurations constitute a most productive approach to the emergence of an unstable, tottering, and often poorly articulated expression of early modern subjectivity.

The fourteen seminar papers assembled in this book by Dominique de Courcelles, the grande dame of Spanish culture and directrice de recherche at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, represent a worthwhile attempt at circumscribing the countless interpretive problems presented by the heterogeneous corpus of literature and the arts in Renaissance Europe. For nature is never a given, but a fictional construct meant to convey the facets of authorial selves as they are caught fashioning themselves for the better or the worse. Hispanic culture is, of course, given the lion's share here, as half of the papers deal with Iberian topics and consider the treatment of "wild nature" in fifteenth-century Castilian literature and politics (Santiago López-Ríos); the interior landscape of the soul in Rodríguez del Padrón's Siervo libre de amor (Juan Carlos Conde); the authorial masked and unmasked virtuosity in Góngora's Soledades (Mercedes Bianco); El Greco's use of a deformed vision to affirm his subjective grasp of the world (Lizzie Boubli); sacred elements syncretistically reinvested into pagan texts of the Andes (Chantal Caillavet); identity search through birdwatching in Bernardim Ribeiro's poem "Menina e Moça" (Helio J. S. Aloes); and, finally, Spanish mystics' creative use of landscapes as "natural magic" to access divine wisdom (Dominique de Courcelles).

French literature comes second as a field of exploration for self-expressivity through the depiction of nature. Clément Marot's "Temple de Cupido" is reexamined as a parody of allegorical landscape leading to the author's spiritual quest (Danièle Duport). Other sixteenth-century poets with evangelical leanings, like Marguerite de Navarre, use natural elements as a symbolic invitation to interior reformation (Rosanna Gorris Camos). Pierre de Ronsard's famous roses are seen as flowers of rhetoric meant to enhance the poet's claim to creativity (Cathy Yandell). Traditional categories borrowed from the classics or the scholastics, like the macrocosm/ microcosm figure, are recycled to emphasize human anthropomorphism in Belon, Rabelais, and other writers (Frank Lestringant). Two papers deal with Montaigne, either to explore the figure of insularity in the Essais (Tom Conley) or the self-appropriating quality of Italian gardens in his Journal de voyage (Philippe Desan). Only one study touches upon Italian literature with Sannazaro's Arcadia as a wishful dream of harmony between nature and civilized society (Carlo Vecce).

To be sure, as in all colloquia of this sort, one might argue with the choice of speakers or the selection of topics. Yet all the contributions point in their own way to some hidden side of landscape depiction, namely its capability for authorial self-representation. In the end, one wonders if the Romantic cliché once denounced by theorists as pathetic fallacy ("la nature est un état d'âme") should not be rehabilitated, mutatis mutandis, as an important component...