'Mens emblematica' et humanisme juridique: le cas du 'Pegma cum narrationibus philosophicis' de Pierre Coustau (1555) (review)

This is an important but also a difficult book. It addresses two readerships, not only the literary scholar with an interest in emblems, but also the legal historian, and this is where the main difficulty lies. Valérie Hayaert assumes from her reader a familiarity with the development of the Corpus Juris Civilis and those who glossed it and commented on it from Justinian's time onwards. More orientation for the literary scholar would have been helpful. Yet the dual focus is vital. The study goes well beyond an analysis of Coustau's emblematic Pegma. Hayaert explores in a more general context the relationship between emblems and the legal profession to which many of the early emblem writers belonged. Emblems form a part of the otium of the humanist lawyer, an interest underpinned by the shared emphasis given to enargeia. Hayaert's starting point is a re-examination of Coustau's life and publications: she advances the philological arguments for the inclusion of works published not only under the name Petrus Costalius but also Costus (thus enlarging the humanist's field of interest, and presenting his familiarity with semitic languages as well as Greek), and reconstructs the writer's connections with Avignon, Lyon, and Geneva. She similarly traces the sense of the word pegma/pegme from a scaffold or gallery, a bookstand, to judicial execution, to a verbal proof of the kind offered by an emblem. In her first detailed analysis of specific emblems, 'Sur le Rhododaphné', Hayaert explores Coustau's position as a humanist in the age of religious dissent, relating her analysis to his work on Old Testament biblical texts (s. n. Costus). She then turns to more general considerations concerning the humanist response to the Corpus Juris Civilis: particular attention is given to the so-called emblemata Triboniani, interpolations whose purpose was explanatory, although later humanists regarded them as corruptions. The literary genre of the emblem is contrasted with such insertions as a jeu sérieux fulfilling a moral purpose. The attitude of Alciato to these and other accretions is fully examined with reference to his emblems and his paralegal works, both viewed as the fruit of otium, relying on the traditions of fable, adage, and ancient literature. An important aspect of this mens emblematica is the relationship it implies between author and reader, with the literary creation serving an aesthetic and mnemonic purpose. Before moving to the analysis of some of Coustau's specifically legal emblems, Hayaert considers the 1548–50 Senneton edition of the Corpus Juris Civilis, where woodcut emblems are inserted at the beginning of each section. These emblems have a unique role within the compilation of fragments that constitutes the Corpus. Emblems then, as is seen in Hayaert's detailed analysis of examples from Coustau's Pegma (each involving her own translation from the Latin), can fulfil the same purpose as confronts humanist lawyers, a reinterpretation based on a myriad of fragments of different sources; the popularity of the genre among the profession should not surprise us.