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  • De la fantaisie chez Ronsard
  • Malcolm Quainton
De la fantaisie chez Ronsard. By Christine Pigné. (Cahiers d'Humanisme et Renaissance, 91). Geneva: Droz, 2009. 600 pp., ill. Pb €91.08.

This scholarly and stimulating book studies the complex relationship in Ronsard's work between the body, the soul, and the fertile world of the fantaisie. This image-making faculty, together with its diverse mediations and 'puissances idolopompes' (p. 145: sleep/dream, blood, the spiritus fantasticus, memory, demons), fascinated Ronsard throughout his life in its multiple manifestations — poetic, erotic, bacchic, prophetic. Christine Pigné structures her analysis on chronological lines, noting in particular the importance of ageing and illness for the evolution of Ronsard's conception of the fantasy. Thus, after having defined the philosophical, medical, and theological topologies that Ronsard inherited from classical and medieval traditions, Pigné demonstrates how in the early years of his career the poet 'puise avec enthousiasme dans les trésors de "l'humaine fantasie"' (p. 33) and reveals a real confidence in the inexhaustible richness of his imagination and a delight in the '[Q]uatre fureurs, qui tour à tour Chatouilleront [noz] fantasies' (Ode à Michel de l'Hospital, 1552). Increasingly sensitive to the promptings of his own ageing body and deteriorating health, as well as responding to the violent personal attacks of Reformist writers, from the early 1560s Ronsard begins to re-evaluate the status of the fantaisie. He expresses a deepening mistrust of the dangerous and illusory nature of what he sees as a perverted form of the imagination, a 'monstrueuse et faulse fantasie' (Institution pour l'Adolescence du Roy, 1562). Instead, he formulates a 'bonne santé de l'imagination' (p. 371) where the excesses and blandishments of a liberated fantasy are controlled by reason. He redefines and limits the field of imaginative enquiry, rejecting the elevation of the soul and its contemplation of the celestial world and preferring instead to seek evidence of divine mysteries in the sublunar and human domains. He distances himself from abstraction, questions the desire for transcendence, and is critical of any belief that reduces the human condition to any one part of the body/soul association. He rejects a vision of inspiration that has its source in an external divine benevolence, considering it now to spring internally (and intermittently) from psychic impulses, from the 'profondeurs obscures du corps humain' (p. 385). This major contribution to Ronsardian studies is persuasively argued, thoroughly researched, and meticulously documented: it respects textual complexities and ambiguities, eschews reductionist readings, and proposes original and compelling interpretations of a number of important poems, often as a result of surprising, but illuminating, intratextual comparisons. Although the book is generally well written, in places the commentary and expression are rather laborious and repetitive and should have been distanced stylistically from the thesis at its origin. Pigné is essentially, though not exclusively, interested in the process of the imagination, in those 'mécanismes physiologico-somatiques' (p. 24) that give birth to fantastic images. For a discussion of the manner in which this process translates itself into poetic utterance, David Foster's doctoral thesis ('Le Fantastique et la fantaisie créatrice dans l'oeuvre de Ronsard', Lancaster University, 2003) provides a valuable complementary volume to Pigné's excellent book and will, hopefully, soon be published posthumously.

Malcolm Quainton
Lancaster University
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