Cosmos and Image in the Renaissance: French Love Lyric and Natural-Philosophical Poetry (review)

Kathryn Banks's closely argued study of cosmic imagery in Guillaume de Saluste Du Bartas and Maurice Scève addresses cosmic analogies in sixteenth-century poetry. It explores, in inventive ways, celestial realms mapped previously by, for example, Isabelle Pantin, focusing on the vexing questions of similitude and the 'image'. The book is in two slightly divergent parts, the first on Du Bartas, the second on Scève; these parts have their own introductions, in addition to the theoretical Introduction that opens the study. The antichronological structure, though counterintuitive, encourages the reader to reflect on questions of influence and prefiguration. Banks works somewhat in the mode of Terence Cave's Pré-histoires, which she discusses perspicuously (p. 20) along with other models for the history of ideas, for example Quentin Skinner's theoretical writings (p. 4). The section on Du Bartas explores poetry's relationship to theology (Chapter 1) and to natural philosophy (Chapter 2). In the first, the comments about whether God was diminished by creation, and about the divine 'breath' (rûach/spiritus/vent), are intriguing and useful; similarly, in the second, the implications of corporeal metaphors for states and monarchs are carefully teased out. The book's second part, on Scève, does not mirror the first, examining instead particular image-clusters characteristic of Scève's dense verse. Chapter 3 ('Illumination and Darkness') provides an elegant reading of Scève's Délie, object de plus haulte vertu against the love dialogues of Leone Ebreo, detailing the permutations of the light/dark and moon/sun nexuses in the Délie. Chapter 4 ('Redemption and Rejection') makes important observations about the anxiety of redemption at the beginnings of Reform: 'Finally, the fantasy figure of a divine lady may betray a fear that God's illuminating or redeeming love is not universal, that some […] will remain in darkness' (p. 174). This chapter compares Scève's poetry with the correspondence between Marguerite de Navarre and Guillaume Briçonnet and (to a lesser extent) with Marguerite's poetry; Marguerite is seen as being more optimistic than Scève about the possibility of redemption. Somewhat frustratingly, the question of what constitutes an 'image' is not resolved, although perhaps it is unrealistic to ask for too rigid a definition. Banks discusses a passage from a commentary on Genesis 1. 26 in which Augustine notes that x's similarity to y is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for x being an image of y ('every image is like that of which it is an image, but not everything which is like something is also its image', p. 16). One wonders what a sufficient condition for being an image would be. Moreover, although as a rule the study avoids teleological explanations, Banks very occasionally breaks this rule (for example, 'French resistance theorists foreshadowed Hobbes in discussing a contract', p. 90). Nevertheless, the book provides exemplarily lucid explorations of a number of difficult problems in sixteenth-century poetic theory and practice.