Pontus de Tyard: errances et enracinement. Actes du Colloque international de Bissy-sur-Fley (23–25 septembre 2005) (review)

For all his activity as a Pléiade poet, long-lived writer on an astonishing variety of humanist subjects, adviser to Henri III, member of the Académie du Palais, and embattled bishop during the Wars of Religion, Pontus de Tyard and his work have remained, as Jean-Claude Carron underlines, mostly invisible both to the general public and to French seiziémistes (p. 132). Foreign scholars (Frances Yates, Silvio F. Baridon, John C. Lapp, Kathleen M. Hall) began to study him in the 1940s and 1950s, and this tradition continued with theses in Belgium, Switzerland, Germany, and the USA. It is, however, chiefly owing to the efforts of the Canadian scholar Eva Kushner, and secondarily to those of Sylviane Bokdam (Paris XII), that Tyard has come to occupy a recognized place on the sixteenth-century map. His complete works have started to appear, and conferences devoted exclusively to him were held in 1998 and 2005. The present publication, the proceedings of the 2005 conference (at Tyard’s own château) celebrating the fourth centenary of his death, contains twenty papers of unequal length plus an ‘Avant-propos’ and an introduction. Except for the old-fashioned reliance on footnote references, the volume is in a very readable format and mostly exempt from error (however, for ‘Bissy’ read ‘Bragny’ (p. 14), for ‘Bongoutx’ read ‘Jongoux’ (pp. 41, 43), and for ‘Jacques de Vintimille’ read ‘Francesco da Milano’ (p. 136)). The theme of ‘errances et enracinement’ is meant to emphasize both Tyard’s literal attachment to Burgundy and his ‘wanderings’ in Paris; and his figurative, spiritual roots in Ficinian Christianity and the intellectual curiosity that took him in many other directions. The quality of the papers is almost uniformly high and most will interest and inform even those readers with a good knowledge of Tyard’s œuvre. Some adduce extratextual evidence to situate him at home and, so to speak, abroad; others submit his best-known works to very learned intertextual analysis; still others (Marie-Madeleine Fragonard, Jean Céard) lucidly explore his less familiar, relatively inaccessible late books, providing extensive quotations from these texts so that the argument need not be taken on faith alone. For the non-specialist, the essays devoted to Tyard’s poetry (particularly Heidi Marek, François Rigolot, S. Bokdam, and Philip Ford) certainly deepen and illuminate our understanding of Renaissance lyricism in general; while Ilana Zinguer on translation and Sophie Kessler-Mesguich on Tyard’s Hebrew and Aramaic dictionaries and grammars broaden our perspective by reminding us that French Renaissance thinkers did not limit themselves to an occidental, Greco-Christian world view. Jean Vignes, relying on documents rather than suppositions, investigates Tyard’s contribution to the late century debates over music and measured verse and clarifies at last his role in the academies of Charles IX/Baïf and Henri III. Finally, Carron’s excellent synthèse, which ought to have been better placed, demonstrates that the ‘déconcertante complexité’ of Tyard’s writings arises from his deep-seated Christianity. His religiosity both informed his errances into rationalism and deformed the results of his research, thereby diminishing his originality and, concomitantly, reducing his interest and importance.