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  • La Forme des choses: poésie et savoirs dans 'La Sepmaine' de Du Bartas
  • Noel Heather
La Forme des choses: poésie et savoirs dans 'La Sepmaine' de Du Bartas. By Violaine Giacomotto-Charra. (Cribles, XVIe-XVIIIe siècles). Toulouse: Presses universitaires du Mirail, 2009. 319 pp. Pb €33.00.

In broad terms, two slightly different critical approaches to Du Bartas's Huguenot creation poetry have emerged over the last decades, partly for local cultural, including religio-cultural, reasons. In terms of substance, this work is a fine example of the French [End Page 384] continental approach, which focuses on La Sepmaine mainly as scientific and encyclopedic poetry in the seminal tradition of Albert-Marie Schmidt. Partly owing to today's ever-increasing secularization, the critical focus of this approach is currently the more salient. The second approach, backgrounded in La Forme des choses, is more allied to longestablished scholarship related to the English Renaissance, within which the Protestant hexameral poet tends to be mainly perceived as a precursor to Milton. Continuing in the French continental line, Giacomotto-Charra is concerned with issues of neo-Aristotelianism, including a significant focus on the elements. The latter are not seen saliently as related to the Chain of Being; this in contrast to the approach typically taken by the second, more — in the French sense — Anglo-Saxon critical approach to La Sepmaine, which generally has a greater concern with Christian Neoplatonism. La Forme des choses largely ignores the bibliographical background to this second approach — including my own 1998 book — but otherwise acknowledges a wide variety of Du Bartas's own potential sources. The first four chapters comprise a very scholarly — and in parts notably insightful — exploration of many of the established themes natural to studies of the poet. Giacomotto-Charra begins by addressing the theoretical background of La Sepmaine, together with strategic parameters of Du Bartas's handling of sixteenth-century scientific discourse. The second chapter ('La Muse savante') explores Du Bartas's notions of poetic theory as expressed in his ars poetica, L'Uranie (1572). Poetic imitation and recreation of divine creation are duly marked as central topics here, although it would have been good to see at least acknowledgement of the significantly playful manner in which the Huguenot poet presents these matters. Similarly, the erudite treatment of Du Bartas's approach to nature in Chapter 3 could have been improved by reference to the underlying Christocentric patterns that, as later in Paradise Lost, are such a prominent feature of both La Sepmaine and L'Eden, the opening section of La Seconde Sepmaine. Chapter 4 focuses on perceived resonances with sources, in particular St Basil's Homilies and Aristotle's Physics. The last three chapters then make perhaps the main contribution of the book. The author elegantly explores resonances between Aquinas's designation of divine creation in terms of creatio, distinctio, and ornatus, and the rhetorical triumvirate of inventio, dispositio, and elocutio as applied by the creating poet. This analysis is a very welcome complement to more established explorations of poetic creation in La Sepmaine conceived in terms of parallels between poetic and divine creation regarded essentially from Neoplatonic viewpoints. Ideally, this work needed to be transformed rather more from the preceding thesis material. Prose style and progress of argument can be quite challenging. At the same time, La Forme des choses in its latter half in particular makes a distinguished contribution to our understanding of the poet who was once for so many 'le divin [Du] Bartas' (p. 104 n.).

Noel Heather
Egham, Surrey
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