Chance, Literature, and Culture in Early Modern France (review)

John D. Lyons and Kathleen Wine have assembled a compelling set of reflections on the place of chance in early modern France. The volume comes in four parts. The contributions to Part I ('Providence in Question') show a number of early modern authors in dialogue with Augustine's thesis, in De civitate dei, that the concept of chance is an expression of our fallen state and of our concomitant remoteness from grasping the divine plan. Against this theological backdrop François Rigolot rereads Montaigne and Rabelais on monsters or 'errors of nature', while Frank Lestringant describes a disagreement between two cosmographers, Jacques d'Auzoles-Lapeyre and Vincento Coronelli, on the supposed imperfection of islands and mountains. The jewel in this section, if not of the whole volume, is Alain Legros's beautifully succinct analysis of Montaigne's own position 'between providence and Fortune'. In Part II ('Poetics and the Aesthetics of Chance') Virginia Krause's subtle analysis of Amadis de Gaule and Wine's essay on Gomberville's Polexandre show how shifting conceptions of chance and design (divine and novelistic) inflect both the structure of romance 'adventure' and, correlatively, the attitude of the hero who may passively await his chance or, increasingly in the seventeenth century, wager against Fortune in calculated risks. To these Lyons adds a convincing analysis of seventeenth-century theorists of chance and the sublime, while John Campbell describes the role of the fortuitousness in Racine, a playwright whose art is frequently thought to leave nothing to chance. Part III ('The Law and the Ethics of Chance') draws out the ethical and doctrinal implications of chance, through Richard Regosin's essay on Montaigne, prudence, and Aristotelian 'rusing' (phronēsis), and Michael Moriarty's lucid exposition of Malebranche on the (seeming) accidents of grace. Finally, Part IV ('Chance and its Remedies') pursues further the question of how we might think and act in the face of chance. Emma Gilby revisits Descartes and finds in the patterns of his thinking a writer more hospitable to the oblique and lateral deviations of chance than the traditional caricature allows. Amy Wygant contributes a highly thought-provoking piece on Montaigne, old age, and Fortune, drawing on an emblem tradition that shows Fortune as a comely woman who offers favours to young men (in her guise as Occasio, or chance in the sense of 'opportunity') while bearing sickness to the old. The book ends with Malina Stefanovska's engaging essay on one connoisseur of the opportune moment, or, in her subject's own words, 'le rencontre' (note the unusual masculine gender): the Cardinal de Retz. Books as good as this one always leave you wanting more, and in the light of these essays it would now be interesting to return, for instance, to Pantagruel's denunciation of divination by dice in the Tiers Livre, to the influence of Epicurean atomism in the period (and not only on Montaigne), or to the ubiquity of gaming in libertine fiction. It is to be hoped that others will now seize the opportunities offered by this rich and fascinating volume.