Obscénités renaissantes (review)

This collective volume by members of a research network investigating the notion of obscenity in Renaissance France is a follow-up to an earlier, more limited work from the same group (Obscenity, edited by Anne L. Birberick, Russell J. Ganim, and Hugh Roberts, EMF: Studies in Early Modern France, 14 (Charlottesville, VA: Rookwood Press, 2010)) and attests the recent academic interest in the subject. In five parts, each with its own bilingual introduction, it is remarkably well organized and coherent and offers a comprehensive analysis of the complex notion of obscenity. The first section, ‘Le Mot et la chose’, sets out to define the term itself, first etymologically, from period dictionaries, where vernacular occurrences appear to be rare, then by examining a number of case studies, including Ovid, Catullus, medieval French texts, emblem books, and Erasmus. The second part deals with ‘intersections of visual and sonic culture with the literary obscene’ (p. 109), domains in which the blurred boundaries between cause and effect are particularly intriguing, as representation of the obscene is generally thought to provoke corresponding acts by stirring the audience’s imagination. Sculpture, emblem books, graphic texts such as Rabelais’s Songes drolatiques de Pantagruel, the provocative Blasons anatomiques du corps féminin, and obscenity on stage, illustrated in early music prints, serve as examples. The third section looks at laughter generated by obscenity and brings into focus two main concerns of the volume: obscenity as the emancipation and revolt of the lower body against rationality; and the avoidance of censorship, in this case through comical effects, euphemisms, and double entendres, all of which, paradoxically, succeed in drawing attention to the very obscenities they are attempting to conceal. Examples are taken from medical treatises, seventeenth-century libertine novels, Renaissance high comedy (as opposed to traditionally crude farce), the opposition of style and content in mock encomia, and Tabourot’s Escraignes dijonnoises (1588). Obscenity as a discourse on human nature is the topic of the fourth section. In their learned discourse, travellers, doctors, and demonologists explored the phenomenon of alterity in all its forms — strangeness, foreignness, monstrosity — as did writers of facetious tales and Rabelais himself. In all cases, these confrontations illustrate hermeneutical challenges through a proliferation of possible interpretations, which occur when the endeavour to fix knowledge is resisted. The final section, in which all the principal concerns of the volume are reflected, not least the elusive concept of the term itself, explores obscenity as a political object, with a focus on the issue of censorship, Rabelais, Christian usages of obscenity, early seventeenth-century satirical collections, and pornographic prints. For anyone interested in this complex subject, Obscénités renaissantes, with its wide variety of approaches and its range of texts analysed, will be mandatory reading.