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  • Thuanus: The Making of Jacques-Auguste de Thou (1553–1617)
  • Neil Kenny
Thuanus: The Making of Jacques-Auguste de Thou (1553–1617). By Ingrid A. R. De Smet. (Travaux d'Humanisme et Renaissance, 418). Geneva, Droz, 2006. 344 pp. Hb. doi:10.1093/fs/knm331

This is an outstanding study of a crucial figure. Jacques-Auguste de Thou was a leading member of the Paris Parlement during the Wars of Religion. A Catholic of politique and Gallican rather than ultramontane persuasion, his friends included Protestants, and he helped negotiate the Edict of Nantes. Renowned for his humanist learning, he was appointed Keeper of the Royal Library. His own library — 'about 9, 000 works in under 6, 000 volumes' (p. 178) — was vast even by the standards of his library-owning class, the lawyer-nobility. Most famously of all, he composed a vast Historiarum sui temporis libri CXXXVIII ('History of his own time in 138 books'), which covered the period up to 1607 and gradually appeared in print over the years leading up to and following his death. However, in this triumph lay the main cause of his downfall. Accused of accommodating heresy — that is, of failing to condemn all Protestants — he was overlooked for promotion to the office of premier président of the Parlement, and largely fell from royal favour. Ingrid de Smet presents her book as a 'foundation for an intellectual biography' (p. 24). This formula describes her method of analysing de Thou via (five) selective themes, but it modestly plays down the extent to which this is a work of socio-cultural as well as intellectual history, and the sheer richness and reliability of its original research. As the title indicates, the guiding thread is Greenblattian self-fashioning. First, De Smet investigates the personae crafted through de Thou's poetry, especially his long poem on falconry and his paraphrase of the Book of Job (both in Latin, like virtually everything he wrote). She brilliantly links de Thou's constant reworking of these compositions to the process of self-fashioning. [End Page 212] Secondly, she investigates the networking, the letter-writing, the seeking and bestowing of favours which helped earn de Thou a prominent position in the Republic of Letters. She gives absorbingly nitty-gritty accounts of how he organized multi-authored collections of funeral poetry (Tumuli) for his father and brother, and of how he befriended the star scholars of his time — Lipsius, Casaubon, Joseph Scaliger. The third theme is de Thou's relationship with women, real and imaginary, especially his two wives. Here as elsewhere, what makes the analysis so fine-grained is De Smet's skill in shuttling between varied sources — from poetry to correspondence to de Thou's autobiography — while retaining nuanced regard for their differing generic conventions. The fourth theme is de Thou's relationship with books and knowledge, including those two great libraries in his life. The fifth focus is on the History, especially its sources, method, language and literary persona. Overall, De Smet has not only vastly deepened the usual image of de Thou — as a peace-promoter who, without editing ancient texts himself, applied critical methods derived from humanism to the chronicling of his own times — but has also gone well beyond that image, by bringing to life the full range of his writing (notably his poetry), quotations from which are accompanied by translations. It would have been helpful, especially for readers with little prior knowledge of de Thou, to begin with a thumbnail chronology of the main events and issues in his life, some of which only emerge here gradually or incidentally. De Smet's impressively scrupulous and generous concern to give previous de Thou scholars their due has perhaps occasionally led her to be a little too reluctant to rehearse their findings. The extent to which she has gone beyond those findings is remarkable. This is a gripping portrait not just of one individual but of numerous others with whom he interacted in troubled, violent times.

Neil Kenny
University of Cambridge
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