Rire à la Renaissance: colloque international de Lille, Université Charles-de-Gaulle – Lille 3, 6–8 novembre 2003 (review)

A vast range of erudition and detailed research combines in these assembled papers, which, while eschewing both definitions and syntheses, will nevertheless reward scholars within the many disciplines represented. One paper at least (by Rosanna Gorris-Camos) studies the philosophy of laughter, reinvestigating Joubert, surely the most signal Renaissance humour theorist. Otherwise, literary studies are well represented, Lakis Proguidis, Marine Molins, Mireille Huchon, Anne-Hélène Klinger, and Elsa Kammerer all providing useful studies of Rabelais (the latter two making comparison with later authors), while Jean Balsamo considers Montaignean humour, making the interesting claim that the laughter of the man is not coincident with that of the Essais. Stephen Bamforth extends his study of Béroalde de Verville into the latter’s discernibly light-hearted treatment of the Confolens abstinent (a Poitevin girl who allegedly avoided food and drink for three years); Anne-Pascale Pouey-Mounou examines the equivocal and potentially comical treatment lent by poets to the Muses; and Jennifer Britnell finds much that deliberately entertains within the initially unlikely figure of Jean Bouchet, one perhaps easier laughed at than with. Less centrally focused on major authors, though equally worthwhile, are Hope Glidden’s treatment of Tabourot’s Apophtegmes du sieur Gaulard, Bruno Roy’s study of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century riddle collections, Chiara Lastraioli’s chapter on various anonymous French works, and Richard Cooper’s on a range of polemical verses attacking various French and Italian townswomen: that their appearance coincided with festivities attendant on royal entries is an intriguing revelation. Max Engammare moves to Geneva with a historical treatment of the (sometimes anti-Calvinist) humour found in the Consistoire archives, and Frank Lestringant goes yet further afield by considering travellers’ accounts of foreign comic traditions, particularly in South America. Otherwise, Didier Kahn examines how some Renaissance parodists mocked the particular subject of alchemy, Michel Jourde shows how satirists exploited the image of the (particularly drunken) parrot as a weapon in their polemical arsenal, and Monique Chatenet turns to horsemanship as a form of display rich in comic potential. Much else is offered by a series of contributions on humour in music, art, and architecture (for example, Howard Burns on Bramante). Thus Frank Dobbins analyses amusing songs from the period, Henri Vanhulst gives a brief treatment of Crespel’s Fricassée, and Annie Cœurdevey, using Roland de Lassus’s compositions, investigates how comedy can penetrate even a medium as strictly controlled as formal Renaissance music. Somewhat analogous is Michèle-Caroline Heck’s approach to the pictorial representations of laughter in painters such as Leonardo, Grünewald, and Raphael, Sylvie Deswarte-Rosa providing a companion piece on Zoroastro, exponent of the grotesque and pupil of Leonardo, of whom he was also and variously a comical caricature. The editor, Marie Madeleine Fontaine, herself concludes the collection with a lengthy and detailed summary that provides especially valuable material on Renaissance writers less prominent elsewhere (for example, Rondelet, Vallériola, and Scaliger), while arguing (contestably) that the increasingly ferocious satires of the Renaissance, in replacing the complicit mockery of the early sixteenth century, helped found ‘la comédie classique’. Occasional lapses emerge (for instance, Rabelais’s self-referencing vis-à-vis the comedy of the mute wife is not unique: contrast Proguidis, p. 15), but the overall standard of editorship and presentation remains meritoriously high.