La France des Humanistes: Henri II Estienne, éditeur et écrivain (review)

The new Europa Humanistica series is devoted to an essential but somewhat neglected undertaking, the study of the transmission of texts at the Renaissance. This second volume of the collection fills a large void by making available, in chronological order, the programmatic prefaces and liminary epistles of 118 texts that one of the most important philologists and humanists of the Renaissance, Henri II Estienne (1531–98), a member of the well-known Estienne dynasty of editors and printers, edited between 1554 and 1598. Estienne's work has often been described as one of the foremost illustrations of the state of Renaissance scholarship, yet his immense production has mostly been of difficult access, with the possible exception of the Apologie pour Herodote, his edition of Anacreon's works, and, among Hellenists, the Thesaurus of the Greek Language. This volume will hopefully rekindle interest in this outstanding figure of the French Renaissance and might even serve as a preliminary work to a more comprehensive study of Estienne's life and work, an undertaking that has not been attempted since the nineteenth century, at which time biographers were overwhelmingly interested in the humanist's patriotism.

Henri II Estienne saw himself as a "médecin des texts" (viii) whose mission was to preserve the texts of antiquity in general and in particular to reestablish the correct usage of the Greek language, his second language (a predilection which sets him apart from most other humanists who usually studied Latin before Greek). His immense learning, diligence, and unbridled ambition enabled him to pursue this task to a level of proficiency that had never been reached before. Hence his critical attitude towards his predecessors and peers — he did not even shy away from pointing out errors or weaknesses in Erasmus's or Budé's Greek — which earned him the reputation of an arrogant and bitter man with a sharp tongue: a frequent juxtaposition opposed the "all-knowing" Henri to the comparatively speaking "ignorant" others (xlii). All these aspects clearly emerge from the chronological reading of the collected pieces of paratext. The autobiographical value of these writings should therefore not be underestimated. Moreover, it becomes obvious that most of the texts of the collection are ultimately at the service of Estienne's greatest philological accomplishment, the Thesaurus of the Greek Language; see for example the liminary texts to his 1563 Treatise on the Abuses of the Greek Language, the 1565 Treatise of the Conformity of the French with the Greek Language (where he presents himself as an "elected hellenist whose life is entirely devoted to the service of the Greek language," xlv), or his 1566 edition of Herodotus and Ctesias.

However, the philological aspect was only one side of the coin. Estienne also valued the typographical part of his work as an editor. He was convinced that the form of the text constituted a fundamental complement to the philological considerations, thus offering a remarkably coherent methodology that encompasses the scientific and mechanical aspects of the editing process. The most visible sign of this conviction might be his frequent habit of leaving blank pages in order to open up a dialogue with his readers. His 1575 Parodiae morales, for instance, systematically leave the left page blank for the readers to add their own poetry, inspired by Estienne's verses on the opposite page.

The collection itself is well presented and edited, with abundant notes that strive to identify and explain Estienne's quotations and allusions whenever possible. The editors have also decided to break up Estienne's flowing texts by adding short explanatory summaries (in French) before each paragraph, which facilitates access to the humanist's sometimes difficult writing, especially for readers whose Greek or Latin is somewhat rudimentary. The biggest shortcoming might be the lack of page numbers on the table of contents listing the liminary texts contained...