Œuvres complètes (review)

This second edition of Bernard Palissy’s complete works succeeds the one assembled fourteen years earlier by the same team of scholars (Keith Cameron, Jean Céard, Marie-Madeleine Fragonard, Marie-Dominique Legrand, Frank Lestringant, and Gilbert Schrenk). Accordingly, the scholarly apparatus has been augmented to encompass studies on Palissy since 1996. Fragonard’s thirty-five page introduction provides a thorough overview of Palissy and his three major works: De la grotte rustique (1563), La Recepte veritable (also 1563), and the Discours admirables (1580). In six sections Fragonard surveys the extraordinarily diverse career of this ‘mixte précartésien’ (p. 37), from humble artisanal origins to the courts of the high aristocracy and monarchy. Throughout his works Palissy the polymath-artisan interweaves his discoveries in ceramics, geology, agronomy, and architecture (and many other fields besides) with a poetic imagination that foregrounds God’s supreme mastery over creation. Nevertheless, Palissy is no composer of peaceful idylls: his three works are shot through with allusions to the vicissitudes of civil war and economic precariousness that he experienced first-hand. Palissy’s first work, De la grotte rustique, was resurrected from obscurity by Ernest Rahir in 1919. Through the dialogue of ‘Demande’ and ‘Responce’ it offers the technical specifications of a grotto to be built for Anne de Montmorency. The same speakers reappear in Palissy’s second and most well-known text, La Recepte veritable. Here their dialogue is much more wide-ranging. Its overarching theme is the creation of an ideal palace and garden that would shelter the innocent (read Protestants) from persecution. Detailed discussion of landscape design — featuring nine opulent ‘cabinets’ in the garden — combine with sombre anticlerical digressions. La Recepte veritable ends on an embattled note, depicting a ‘ville de forteresse’ in which shelter from war may be sought (p. 223). A third book is announced; this would become the Discours admirables of 1580, a miscellany of treatises continuing Palissy’s exploration of diverse subjects such as hydrology, metallurgy, and mineralogy. The Discours admirables proceed in the uncompromising polemical verve of earlier works; yet they contain an intriguingly equivocal dialogue on alchemy in which ridicule of al-chemical transmutation is offset against the possibility of metals evolving into more perfect forms. This 2010 edition will be welcomed by Renaissance scholars and students. The transcription of the text and abundant footnotes appear very accurate and enlightening. Palissy’s own ‘Explication des mots plus difficiles’ (pp. 566–74) will be of interest to lexicographers as evidence of linguistic uncertainty in the sixteenth century. However, certain lacunae persist from the 1996 edition. The history of printed editions given on page 585 still omits Le Moyen de devenir riche (1636), ostensibly the first (if flawed) two-volume compilation of Palissy’s complete works. The origins of De la grotte rustique remain a mystery. The general bibliography is solid but heavily biased towards franco-phone criticism (for instance, there is no work by Neil Kenny listed among the studies on curiosity). These quibbles aside, Fragonard and her colleagues have again produced the most erudite and useful edition of Palissy’s works to date.